Dad had an glaucoma operation on his left eye last Thursday and got out of the hospital yesterday. Mom and my sister went to see him twice a day during the time of his hospitalization to bring him the meals. So far he is happy with what has been achieved through the operation and the progression of the healing. The bad eye’s pressure has dropper to 8-9, which is even lower than another normal eye’s. The doctor said it impossible to reverse the vision loss to the level of what’ he’s got before the glaucoma happend, but it can sort of stop the things getting deteriorated.

What the surgery does was to make a cut in Dad’s bad eye to reduce the intraocular pressure. They used the laser beam of light to make several small scars in the eye’s drainage system to help inccrease the flow of fluid out of the eye. There are only 80% of surgeries would get successful, and the rest 20% might come across this or that kind of problems, like the later complications. Dad remembers everything the doctors did during the surgery, and he heard them talking and discussing, what instruments the primary surgeon asked for at the different stages. He even heard the doctor said there were one and half minute to decide how big of the diameter of the cut they are going to make.

Anyway, he finally gets treated in some ways, after nearly two years’ neglect and being unproperly handled by the doctors. The annual medical examination suggested that there was something wrong with his eyes in early of 2004, but Dad thought it just some minor problems commonly happen on the aged people. He is 75 and never had any big health problems, what could he expect? Keep the eye vision at 2.0 forever? So he thought that natural for his eyes to get worse, then he didn’t pay much attention on it until 2005 before he came to visit us. His eye vision lost so much that he had to get a pair of spectacles to help him read and see the things in the distance. Meanwhile he started to use medicine (mostly eye drops) to easy the eye tention. But what’s changed? Nothing. He went to see the doctors again and again. They were mostly so-called experts or medical professors. He has been normally treated as a high eye pressure patient and been transferred from one expert to another, until a couple of weeks ago he was finally diagnosed as Glaucoma.

I mean it is really rediculous to spend one year to diagnose the glaucoma. Glaucoma is a very common condition and it’s not some medical difficult at all in this era. Any ophthalmologist with the basic medical knowledge should have been able to draw a conclusion via some simple medical tests. Unfortunately that didn’t happen. Dad had been sufferring this for more than two years and what had happend is just irreversible.

Another issue has been raised is, I am falling in the group at higher risk for developing glaucoma as I am the immediate family member with glaucoma. Dad’s condition increases the risk of glaucoma four to nine times on me because this one is hereditary. Well, what can I do? I should thank the God that it turns out not cancer or other more horrifying illnesses.

However I love my eyes but I don’t really treat them well. My left eye’s vision has only 0.6-0.7 and I have been refusing to wear the glasses in the past 10 years. From now on, I will keep an eye on that, if my eyes allow me to do so , and closely look into any possible factors that could make my eyes get blind. But now, I need to look the computer