Today's Eye Episode
We had quite a roller coaster day with Mom's eye problems. We went to see Dr Schraut this morning at 10:30, expecting to see him in his office and then go to St. E's to do another round of antibiotics in her eye. When she got in to see him he had not yet heard from the lab where the tests had been run. After he called them they said that no cultures had grown from the sample, so it appeared there was no infection. Schraut seemed puzzled by that because the eye was very inflamed. But he said he would not continue with the antibiotics and would treat the inflammation. Mom asked something about her sight in the eye and he responded, "I'm not worried about your sight now." We left his office thinking this was all positive stuff--no infection and that the inflammation, while puzzling, seemed not to be a threat to her vision. It did seem odd that Shraut had seen so much evidence of infection when he cleaned her eye out on Sunday, but oh, well.
I dropped Mom off at home and got back to work about 12:30. About 2 p.m. I got a call from her saying there had been a mistake in the lab work, that there were signs of infection, and that we were to meet Schraut at the hospital in about an hour.
Schraut explained that he had taken two culture samples on Sunday--one from the front of the eye and one from the back. Unknown to him, the lab report from the morning had only been for the front culture. The other one had infection in it. he was very unhappy about this. He said that the agent had been staphloccocus epiderma (sp?), a staph germ that lives on the surface of the skin. It doesn't normally cause infections and is one of the easier ones to treat when it does. However, this one had caused a serious infection in her eye. He was confident of the antibiotics' ability to bring the infection under control quickly; in fact, he thought it had already peaked. But the extent to which the infection has damaged the retina will only become apparent in the coming weeks. There's really no way to tell now. He gave her some numbing eyedrops and then (after I'd departed the room) two shots of antibiotics. The shots were not supposed to give her any pain, but he wrote a pain presecription and she got hit pretty hard with it as we drove home. This process is supposed to be repeated on Thursday; Mom's planning to premedicate with her nice codeine-based pain-killer.
When Mom talked to her regular eye doctor, Mattingly, afterward it became apparent that inflammation was a serious threat and that the sense of Schraut's comment on not being worried about her sight was that he was concerned about saving the eye itself. Note to self: never, ever put a positive spin on anything a medical doctor says.
So the situation is, despite short-lved delusions from this morning, that we are pretty much in a wait-and-see mode. I'll keep you posted.
I dropped Mom off at home and got back to work about 12:30. About 2 p.m. I got a call from her saying there had been a mistake in the lab work, that there were signs of infection, and that we were to meet Schraut at the hospital in about an hour.
Schraut explained that he had taken two culture samples on Sunday--one from the front of the eye and one from the back. Unknown to him, the lab report from the morning had only been for the front culture. The other one had infection in it. he was very unhappy about this. He said that the agent had been staphloccocus epiderma (sp?), a staph germ that lives on the surface of the skin. It doesn't normally cause infections and is one of the easier ones to treat when it does. However, this one had caused a serious infection in her eye. He was confident of the antibiotics' ability to bring the infection under control quickly; in fact, he thought it had already peaked. But the extent to which the infection has damaged the retina will only become apparent in the coming weeks. There's really no way to tell now. He gave her some numbing eyedrops and then (after I'd departed the room) two shots of antibiotics. The shots were not supposed to give her any pain, but he wrote a pain presecription and she got hit pretty hard with it as we drove home. This process is supposed to be repeated on Thursday; Mom's planning to premedicate with her nice codeine-based pain-killer.
When Mom talked to her regular eye doctor, Mattingly, afterward it became apparent that inflammation was a serious threat and that the sense of Schraut's comment on not being worried about her sight was that he was concerned about saving the eye itself. Note to self: never, ever put a positive spin on anything a medical doctor says.
So the situation is, despite short-lved delusions from this morning, that we are pretty much in a wait-and-see mode. I'll keep you posted.
posted by Webmaster at 8:04 PM
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Footnote: Mom asked Scraut if she would be able to drive if she lost sight in one eye. He said there was no law preventing it and people do it all the time. Several people had already shared stories with her of blind-in-one-eye relatives who drive. Presumably there are ways to compensate for lack of depth perception.
Footnote 2: As I was waiting for Mom in the Emergency Room waiting area, a guy came in and told the attendant that a there was a man slumped over in his car, not moving, who'd been like that for half an hour. They went out to check the situation, at which time Mom emerged, ready to leave. When we got to the parking lot the vehicle next to us was the one in question: an ancient, beat-up Pontiac, running, windows-up, with the driver slumped at the wheel in a tee shirt and baseball cap, not moving. The attendant was knocking at the window trying, futilely, to rouse him. He looked up at me rather sheepishly and seemed to shrug his shoulders; I didn't know what to do and Mom was in pain, so I pulled out. As we were leaving the lot a Lafayette police car was pulling in. That was the kind of day it had been. Enigmatic.
I'm glad Mike is posting this news. The computer lite is too bright for comfort. I did want to say that I had been put on an antibiotic two days before surgery-the usual one they give. However for my infection it was not an effective one, so he changed it .
Ah, the medical world
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