It has been three weeks since I posted to Mental Seeds. Begun with such enthusiasm. Begun with such energy to actually follow through on new images and personal work. Begun with optimism to see beyond the tears in my retina.
How very frustrating that the retina now continues to become detached. How sad those images sit unfinished, waiting dumbly in my big computer while I fiddle with a laptop against my chest. I will, I must finish them. Whatever they will be, though fading in the immediacy of that time, they are mine. And I will do more. Whatever that more may be, I must explore where this takes me.
For now I will use Mental Seeds as an actual web log to list a chronology of events. The retina in my left eye has now become detached 4 times and I have had 5 surgeries. This is my recollection.
Wednesday Oct 27. Kaiser exam and immediate referral to UCSF Medical Center for detached retina. First surgery, a pneumatic retinopexy as the Giants begin their first World Series game. Surgery not successful.
Wednesday Nov. 3. Referral for second opinion to Dr. Richard McDonald of West Coast Retina who confirms concern over coloboma of the optic nerve and concurs with UCSF that a vitrectectomy is required. UCSF asks him to take the case.
Friday Nov. 5. Surgery at St. Mary’s Hospital. Dr McDonald does vitrechtomy and scleral buckle with gas bubble, requiring face down recuperation for one week.
Thursday Nov. 11. Follow-up shows retina “A”ttached. Head up tomorrow, resume life while gas bubble dissipates.
Saturday Nov. 13. Need garden day, wonder what I can see and begin using Canon G11 to explore and interpret.
Thursday Nov. 18. Follow-up encouraging, “A”ttached. Wait two weeks for next follow-up as gas bubble dissipates.
Saturday Nov. 20 and continuing for 2 weeks – new, wonder filled photos as new vision adjusts. Begin to work on launching Mental Seeds blog. Until:
Thursday Dec. 16. Supposedly routine follow-up shows gas bubble has receded enough to allow new leak and detached retina. Immediate laser surgery in Dr. McDonald’s office. Head back down, nose to my toes.
Monday Dec. 20. Retina re-attached. “Home run”, keep head down until Friday, Christmas Eve. Great few days. Kids home Xmas day.
Monday Dec. 27. Follow-up with Dr. Jumper shows detachment. New gas bubble added to eye by Dr. Wender. Head position back down, nose to toes.
Thursday Dec. 30. Retina attached, Dr. McDonald laser surgery this time near optic nerve but only partially complete as gas bubble position prevents complete procedure; also repair around buckle. pain visualized, how odd this queasy flash
Monday Jan. 3. Retina partially detached again. Need to add more to gas bubble to flatten out retina. Continue head down position.
Wednesday Jan 5. Retina attached, and additional laser surgery completing the procedure around optic nerve. OK to lift head up a bit. Wait 3-4 weeks as gas bubble dissipates to see if successful.
So now, for the first time in weeks I will have chance to get back to using my computer and catching up on my work. Let’s see were this goes ….
Updates
Tuesday Jan. 18. Gas bubble receeded enough for additional laser surgery. Previously Dr. McDonald could not quite see at the horizon line between gas and center of eye.
Thursday Feb. 3 Additional laser surgery postponed as vision loss identified now that bubble nearly gone. Loss corresponds to laser treatment area. OK to plan travel for Dad’s memorial service.
All along we have been trying to get the retina to become attached and would see how it affected vision. Now we seem to know there will be a loss – dead zone in peripheral superior. Vision still quite blurry around the dead zone but seems somewhat better every day. Stay tuned …
March 22. As I prepare to see Dr.McDonald again on Thursday, I went to Kaiser optometrist for vision exam. Blurriness in my eye is mostly attributed to a cataract that has formed due to all the surgery. Good news for the blurry left eye – once it has recovered enough to have THAT surgery.
After the eye surgery, when I first started exploring what I could see, or not, with my left eye, I went looking for color. The first realization that I could see anything the least bit artistically interesting was when I studied the white flower of Camellia sasanqua ‘Apple Blossom’ after brushing against it in the garden. I wrote about this in M’Eyes. But its white flower only looked gray and foggy through the bubble in my eye. I really wanted to see something bright.
I have several sasanquas in my shrub border and the most intense is ‘Kanjiro’. It was in full bloom and easy to get to, being right along my driveway. So it became my first “study” and I took many different compositions trying to capture something, anything, interesting. I took off my eye glasses and plunged my face into the shrub, rubbing against the flowers. I could not see a thing in my left eye unless it was completely in front of me, and with my right eye still open I could make out some distant details.
Seeing a composition and capturing it with a camera are what I do for a living, but this is different. Now my two eyes see very different things, and one eye barely sees anything. In order to capture something of the duality of what I see I am learning to use the G11 camera and its swivel viewfinder. I can pinpoint the focus in the distance and then hover the camera on top of the flower until I find a composition that is the essence of my blurry vision.
In Kanjiro1, opening this post, I finished off the photo with brush painting in Photoshop on some of the broader color edges. This to convey a bit of the watery, jiggly nature of concentrating with two different eyes at the same time. It is a new thing for me, that I need to finish the photograph with manipulation in post production, but the camera alone can not capture what I see.
Even trying to capture what the one blurry eye sees by itself requires learning a few tricks, made possible with the G11. Typically I shoot with a tripod, composing a scene and filling up the entire frame with carefully chosen elements. But now, my process of understanding what I see is done without the aid of a camera framing a scene. What I see are blurs and vague hints of shape inches from my eye.
With the swivel back of the G11 I can hold the camera away from my face, hover the out-of-focus lens over the flowers, and turn the viewfinder so that my good eye can tell me when to click. After I take each picture, I put my face back into the shrub, now covering my good eye so only the blurs register, then look for and fix upon an impression. Once I have an idea, I pull back, point the camera where my head just was and gingerly frame the blur.
Each time I put my blurry eye to use I get confidence that what it sees is new and worth documenting. These perceptions are truly new. Unlike my nearsightedness, where detail becomes clear when I get close, these blurry impressions are only seen up close. As my brain begins to co-ordinate the camera (and the good eye) to the impressions of my blurry one, I wave the camera outstretched, its lens brushing leaves and flowers, its swivel viewfinder pointing back to me. I feel like I am probing with a remote tool.
My eyes are getting better every day and soon I suspect these blurry camellia photos, already weeks old, will only live in memory never to actually be seen again. I do hope so, but also hope these new perceptions grant me new insight with future work. Onward.
After retina surgery, the doctors put a nitrous oxide gas bubble into my eye. This is just enough pressure to hold the retina in place while it heals. The bubble is the reason my eyesight is so blurry in the left eye.
Depending on how I hold my head, the gas bubble moves around; and when I look straight down at something very close to my eye I am best able to combine the vision of two eyes into one image. I don’t know the actual explanation. But for one thing, I can see next to nothing unless I practically put my face into it. If I look down, the gas bubble becomes almost a perfectly symmetrical drop of water. In fact, everything looks watery as the bubble bobs with the slightest movement of the head.
Combine the one eye with a watery bubble that can only make out faint shapes at close range, with a good eye wearing bi-focals and you get some new perspective on seeing.
So now I am off into my garden to see what I can see, thinking I need to juxtapose various layers of subject matter into one frame. I put my head right in among the beautiful dogwood leaves with their fall color and looked to the ground. As I contemplate what I am seeing, with my left eye getting real friendly with leaves, and right eye focusing on the ground, I begin to realize the fluid nature of the bubble is making the leaves on the ground look watery.
The potentially for wonderful photograph was made possible by my Canon G11 camera. In normal times I use a tripod for all pictures. For thoughtful consideration of a composition and ultimate sharpness, a tripod is essential; but there would be no way for me to use a tripod looking straight down while in the middle of tree branches. The G11 has a swivel back which allows me to see the viewfinder no matter what direction the camera is pointed.
So I held the camera out from my body where my head had been, positioned right next to the leaves and pointed down. I could see the image in the swiveled up viewfinder and began to gently probe for a composition. The camera would autofocus on the ground and I could later use Photoshop to make those sharp leaves look watery.
Each composition has its merits. Different amounts of negative space. Different amounts of the soft blurry orange.
If I put my eyes completely onto the leaves to get a complete mass of orange my right eye can still see a wee bit of focus, a slot between two leaves. Now there is so much blur I can not see the watery affect, but still quite interesting:
I have a very unusual optic nerve – my left. I have often, rather flippantly, credited my career choice as a photographer to my optic nerve coloboma. It has never been more than a fascinating curiosity to optometrists; until now, after the detached retina and Dr. Richard McDonald of West Coast Retina began explaining the need for a more serious eye surgery – a vitrectomy. My first procedure at UCSF Medical Center had not worked.
He explained that my twisted nerve may or may not be the source of fluids leaking behind the retina, but since the initial procedure had not worked, new surgery would be required. If the nerve attachment was the problem we would find out. As I write this we still don’t know, but all signs point to a full recovery without the optic nerve itself needing any special treatment.
In the eye scans above, taken at UCSF you can see how my left eye is blurry. Eyeball fluid has leaked behind the retina, forcing its detachment. Fortunately, we caught this while the retina was only partially detached and had not pulled away from the macula in the center of the eye.
From this point on I won’t be talking anymore about the specifics of my medical condition. I am healing, and I know so many folks who have dealt with much more scary medical problems. However, m’eyes are seeing new things never imagined. I will be using my Mental Seeds blog postings to show a new body of work, trying out new ideas, asking you for feedback.
Fundamentally, I see things so very differently now because I am using a good eye and one blurry at the same time. I am not supposed to use a patch over the blurry eye, so I find myself comically wobbling about. I did not intend to take pictures while in this condition, thinking I would not be able to see and assess my normal subjects in the garden.
But when I ran into the flower of this Camellia ‘Apple Blossom’ while trying to do a wee bit of gardening between the two surgeries, I felt compelled to try and document what is happening.
I don’t know why I am a gardener, no more than I know why I am a photographer. But I do know working in the garden keeps my sanity. It gives me a chance to work with the earth, to nurture beauty, to recognize my higher self as part of a grander thing than me. On one of those days between surgeries, I simply had to do something in the garden. I needed to take my mind off my worries.
I literally ran into this flower – or perhaps it smacked me. Either way I had to stop, “wake up dude !”; then drink in it’s delicate smell and force myself to analyze what I could, and could not see out of my left eye. It was full of a gas bubble, part of the treatment to hold the retina in place. I really could see almost nothing but a gray blur. But if I put my face right next to the flower, literally stroking my face, I could see the faintest outline. It is an oddly primal, catlike sensation to draw one’s face across that which we want to see. Sight made tangible.
When I try to look with both eyes my visual cues and perceptions go wild. I posted a series on my group blog at Gardening Gone Wild and will use this space here at Mental Seeds to go into more depth about the individual photos as I try to understand myself what all this might mean.
Without trying to over analyze what it means I am setting off to illustrate it. I have always advised those who want to learn photography that they should play with their cameras, break the “rules”- learn what works for them. This detached retina business is giving me an opportunity to see things differently. The real challenge is how to capture it with a camera. The two eyes see vastly different things. Cameras can barely capture what one eye sees.
But, no rules. Go try. Thank goodness my friend David Perry had turned me on to the beauty of the Canon G11 camera; a “point and shoot” that shoots raw and has a swivel back viewfinder. At least I had a tool that I could use as I began to explore new perceptions.
I had stuck my face into the Camellia in order to see it. Let me stick my face into my Magnolia cambellii whose leaves were beginning to drop:
I put my face into the branch structure and looked down at the leaves on the ground. The leaves had little color looking through the gas bubble in my eye, and the camera captured way too much in focus, no matter what setting I tried. And the leaves on the ground looked watery, due to the dual vision I suppose, but there was no way the camera was going to give me what I saw.
But I knew what I wanted to get. I could previsualize, knowing what PhotoShop could do. So I took a bunch of pictures not sure what was in focus. I could hardly tell anyway. It turns out the most important thing was to have the foreground soft focus so I could play with the rest in PhotoShop Layers.
This is fun (if a bit tedious) – figuring ways to manipulate the photos in the computer so that they tell the story of what I see. But it is constructive fun. I am not manipulating for the sake of some goofy affect, I am trying to give some sense of what I am seeing. Each new photo is a new attempt. Onward with m’eyes open and camera in hand.
Update on Detached Retina
