As good as it gets

I had a meeting with my plastic surgeon today to talk about the last surgery I had. It’s been a little over five months now, so in terms of results, everything should be stable.

In my opinion, the position of my eye, while better, is still not perfect. In addition, I still have double vision in the top-left version of my visual field. My plastic surgeon did a few simple tests on me, mainly involving looking at my eye and tracking its movement using a finger.

At least to my surgeon, the results are acceptable and do not warrant another surgery. For now, I have a few referrals to some eye doctors that will measure the actual displacement of my eye, and suggest possible other means to correct the double vision (either different glasses or perhaps muscle surgery on my left eye). I have, however, always been opposed to what I consider surgical hacks. Changing the position of a muscle on my eye or removing skin from an eyelid just doesn’t appeal to me, and so if this is as good as it gets, I’ll just move on and put this whole chapter behind me.

I’m slightly disappointed that my surgeon, who went out of his way to tell me that he was the best in the province pre-surgery, didn’t really have much more to offer today. It’s not that I want to have another surgery, but this is an injury that can usually be corrected to the point where it is no longer noticable. I met a guy in the Dominican Republic who had a similar incident happen to him (he was jumped by a guy with a bat), and his entire cheekbone was displaced in addition to an orbital floor fracture. He only had one surgery, and looking at him I was unable to find any indication that he was ever injured. Perhaps some of my problems come from the fact that my tripod fracture was never properly repaired, mainly because some medical student told me it wasn’t worth fixing. Or perhaps the internal anatomy of my eye has changed enough to make a proper repair impossible.

The good news is that I can move on and perhaps just find an expert in a few years to take another look at it and see if there is anything more they can do. I’ll go to these next appointments and see what they have to say, but I have a feeling that this is, for now, as good as it gets.