The finitude of life is ultimately what gives it meaning.
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I won’t go echoing what has already been said here but I just want to point out that you are in control of quite a lot of the things that seem to be causing you a lot of issues at the moment.
(1) Leave that group on Facebook. Today, just do it. It’s doing you no good and you’re only looking for the negatives in it, of which there will always be plenty (ie. the huge number of people who have recovered from the detached retina are far far less likely to be posting on Facebook groups in the aftermath of it as opposed to those who’ve had issues. Think about it logically if you can. You’re mostly only getting the worst of the worst on there)
(2) Shower. Shave. Brush your teeth. Eat. Force yourself to do it. It will help hugely as to how you feel and you will feel much much better afterwards.
(3) Stop rationing medication. Take it as prescribed. If you need more you’ll get more. I get a sense of almost self sabotage with this. You clearly need it, so take it. Again, please think about it logically if you can.
(4) The refusal to go to A&E because you’ve had close relatives that have died in that hospital. Again, this will be the case for the vast majority of people. Everyone has had close relatives that have died in hospitals. That tends to be a place where people will die. It’s also a place where the vast majority of people can great help and recover. You’re just focusing on the 3 relatives who haven’t (two were grandparents you said, and again not to be pointing out the obvious but a lot of people have grandparents who pass away in hospital). Go to the hospital. You need to.
(5) As far as I recall from my mother, one of the biggest factors in causing issues with the eye in the aftermath of the operation is blood pressure and over exertion. I’m pretty sure screaming and shouting and shrieking and rolling around the ground at the top of your voice, staring at screens reading up on the retinal detachments and everyone that can go wrong with them or watching hours on end of suicide videos (outside of being a really unhealthy thing to do for anyone’s mental wellbeing) is actually pretty much the worst fucking thing you can possibly be doing for the eye itself. So do try and stop that because I think it will help in healing the eye much much quicker if you try to stop working yourself up in these ways.
You seem to want the eye to be better straight away and have more or less convinced yourself that it won’t be and if you try to take a step back from things for a second you’ll see that these small things are obstructing the eye getting better, so it’s a vicious circle. I think taking the medication properly will help alleviate the shrieking/shouting episodes and the other stuff (Facebook group and videos) you have control of.
Time to get yourself on the road to recovery now and stop obstructing it yourself. Where’s the spirit and grit and fight we know and love? You determined bastard, you’re like a fucking dog with a bone when you want to be. Harness that. It’s in you and you’ll rediscover it if you allow yourself to be helped.
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I’m sure there is someone in Cork who can.
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I’m serious and genuine
Go to see a professional not the quack
My son was in a similar situation but I never noticed
Until his counselor pointed it out plain n simple
He’s an active plan to leave this planet
Wake up and smell the coffee she basically told me
visualised hanging myself with a bedsheet or a scarf at the GAA post beside the trees near the river at Dangan, opposite Menlo Castle.
That is not good bud
There’s no comeback unless you seek intervention
There are numbers
Use them
This place I’d full of desperados in one guise or another
But all including the cunts I could strangle ( my boy blue / Carry harry)
Are fairly normal and wouldn’t want anything to happen to you
Life is sweet and precious
The Sweet part will come friend
It did for my smallie with a lot of work
And it’ll come for you
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Agreed. I am in control of quite a lot of things.
I joined the Facebook group around four weeks ago when I was still desperate for information. I’ve probably got about as much information about my condition from various sources including actual experts, academic papers, general digging and and discussion groups as I’m ever going to get at this stage. This was coming a background of zero knowledge. It’s very much information overload at this point and I agree, it’s doing me no good. And certainly agreed on the heavy bias in these groups towards people with bad experiences, though there are some good posters too with optimistic stories. But yes, agreed on the whole.
I had a shave this morning even if it was only with a barber’s razor and I did feel better. Contrary to what I said previously, I did receive a text notification of counselling yesterday and I went to it this morning and got on much better than at the last two sessions.
Planning to have a shower this afternoon.
I’ve been on one anti-depressant per day since November 2nd and haven’t missed a day. What I have been rationing are the anti-anxiety tablets called Anxicalm. There isn’t a prescription as such as to how often you should take them, it says take them every 6 hours if experiencing anxiety. But I guess that’s all the time for me. 20 tablets don’t even last a week if doing that. I had one there about an hour ago.
The stuff about the relatives was just me going off on a rant. That isn’t the real reason I’m reluctant to go in. The real reason is I’m afraid of going to hospital like everybody else is. I know I have to go the hospital and I am going to go the hospital but it will be tomorrow and it will have to be early because that’s the best time to go in.
Yes this has been strongly suggested to me by both non-doctors and at least one doctor I know. Twice during the last five or six weeks I’ve been off the computer for a stretch of many hours. Once was Saturday October 29th from lunchtime until the next day and I went to bed that night more content than at any time during the last 70 days, even though Liverpool lost to Leeds that evening. I was back on it the next day and that night made what is by far the most serious suicide attempt I’ve ever made (the only half serious one in my life in truth). The other was last Monday afternoon until 11 that night when my mother confiscated the computer from me. In that seven hours or so I recovered a good deal of composure from a previously disastrous situation.
Yeah, I do want it to be better straight away. But it doesn’t get better straight away. My surgeon wrote to me a few weeks back and gave a timeline of 1-2 years, with an uncertain outcome. I’m a strange person in that I like to be positive about other people if I feel they’re doing things in good faith or making a genuine effort but I completely throw that out when dealing with myself.
As regards the medication, I need to take what I have but also to get seen in the hospital and see if they have anything else that would help me.
I should say that me having these episodes has been far from unknown before all this eye malarkey happened.
I can remember particular dates. I remember one Christmas Eve, 2009, I went apeshit out of nowhere and broke one of those window panels above a bedroom door with a ladder. I spent Christmas on my own in Dublin, eating pasta with sauce from a jar, while all my family were in Galway.
January 22nd, 2012, it was a Sunday, Dublin were playing Kildare in Newbridge in the O’Byrne Cup, I wasn’t at it. Something caused me to fly off the handle completely that morning, possibly a hangover, I was drinking heavily around this time. I cut off my hair to the scalp and then wet shaved it completely bald, as some sort of proxy for self-harm.
March 11th 2012, again a Sunday, Dublin played Armagh at Croke Park, again I didn’t go, I went apeshit when a friend rang me that morning, I couldn’t take the call, I couldn’t face talking. I curled up in a ball in the back garden and screamed.
February 9th, 2019, a Saturday. My father was wearing a formal shirt, he had slept in it, and needed to be changed. I was having arguments with my Mam because she was putting formal shirts on him and I said this was ridiculous, that he needed comfortable clothes, a t-shirt or something. I cut the shirt off him with a scissors and myself and my mother had a furious argument. I stormed off to for Dublin for two full weeks and drank and smoked and whatever else, leaving my Mam effectively on her own in that time to deal with my father.
In one of the Canice Picklington pieces I did, I made a reference to the character cutting themselves with a knife. That was a reference to something I did myself for real around 2013. I took out a knife and slashed the top of my hand and forearm. Another time around the same year I took a swig of turpentine before spitting it out.
I used to regularly play chicken with cars while drinking. At the end of a night out I’d sometimes go down those steps on the wall of the Liffey quays to relieve myself. Once in Lanzarote I shook every lampost to make the lights go out, and ended up pouring blood when one the glass globes holding the lamp smashed all over my forehead. I ended up with a massive black eye and was probably lucky I didn’t lose the eye. And I wasn’t 21, I was 28. How clever.
As far back as 1998 I was doing ridiculous shit. When I got my Leaving Cert results I drank 13 pints by 4pm. I nearly choked on my own vomit. At one party in 2001 I poured half a bottle of a girl’s perfume into my cider and drank it thinking it was funny and impressing people. A real life Father Jack. It wasn’t impressing people. All this was part a rich tapestry of self-destruction.
And there’s so much more besides.
The one person or thing I’ve never been like a dog with a bone about is myself. This is the paradox of me. Obviously this needs to change.
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Alcohol etc has to go
Haven’t had a drop since November 1st.
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Well that’s a good start
BTW I’m not a " nothing so pure,
As a reformed whure"
Chap
But know personally how the fuckin stuff cam make you maudlin and melancholy
I remember reading about Brian McGuigan at the time of his eye injury in 2007. It was horrific and he never got his full sight back. There were two nurses who came into me while I was waiting for surgery. I don’t know why but I mentioned to one of them I that remembered reading about McGuigan and had some idea of what to expect during recovery. But really, I didn’t.
To win another All-Ireland like he did was astounding.
Sometimes though he looks back with a frown because he’s just about able to look at anything at all. To this day his eyesight is still impaired after that shocking, cowardly hit he was subjected to in a club game back in 2007. For days he was blind, his eye having been effectively squashed. For weeks he could not lift his head. Instead he had to lie face down towards the floor and peer through a face-hole on his bed to watch the flat-screen TV his family had positioned on the ground; if he lifted his head at all, to even go the toilet, he was told he could lose his sight for good. A year later he would be back winning another All-Ireland.
It’s probably the most cherished of the lot. 2003 was for Tyrone, 2005 was for Cormac, 2008 was for himself and Mickey Harte and the faith they had that he could come back. But he was probably only half the player he was because he could see only half of what he once could. And that still eats a bit of him.
“I’d still have a lot of anger about that to this day. I’m more or less working off one eye. I have to wear this special lens but I still have no peripheral vision on my left side. I feel I’ve lost out a lot on life. To lose so much of your sight through playing football is hard to take.”
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I went and got the whole whack of an eye test done in specsavers this week
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I got it done the week I read this believe it or not. Got test done behind eyes for extra €25 and got two new pairs of glasses.
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Well worth doing. I’ve been for three full eye examinations in the last five weeks. After the event, of course, if only, if only.
One thing I preferred about Athenry Opticians where I went for one of them over Specsavers is that do dilated examinations. The dilation drops open up the eye better for the examiner to look into.
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I nearly came clean out of the seat when the air puffs went in the first time
Life is hard @Cheasty , as I’ve said to you before my heart goes out to you re the detached retina. Everyone on this forum or this world to be far has multiple “crosses” to deal with.
Look after your good eye and be grateful for what you have. Its very easy to just focus on the negative. I’m guilty of that like everyone else is more often than not id say.
In time there is a good chance that they will be able to fix it up.
Keep posting. Everyone is on your side here.
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It’s mad that while all that was going on for you, you were no doubt posting here getting into furious arguments about all sorts of shit and taking and giving dogs abuse.
I know there was a lot of chat about the fellas who’ve been sick and even died but it does make you stop and think that if you don’t know what going on in people’s personal lives at work etc it’s really magnified on anonymous message boards. They are great in a lot of ways but can be desperately poisonous. This place has been notably less bitter or poisonous the last few months for whatever reason.
In early 2015 I had an eye exam done at Specsavers before getting new glasses. The examiner specifically mentioned retinal detachment and told me to go to a specialist. I did. It was at the Hermitage which is walking distance from me in Dublin. I expected I’d be fine to walk back. Big mistake. Yer man nearly blitzed my eye with all the air he puffed into it. He said I was fine. When I got out into the air the sunshine nearly made me faint. I staggered home at crawl speed.
Getting your teeth cleaned is another procedure you expect to be a doddle and usually turns out to be a very chastening experience. Getting a filling is a doddle by comparison.
stop. my gums were in shite because I need regular cleanings and didn’t get them with covid etc during the stoppages etc.
I needed to get a deep clean where they get right in there under the gums. A nasty horrible experience
@estebandogbreath
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I would venture that the bitterness of these arguments spilled into my personal life and mood more than I would like to admit. And for what. To insult anonymous (mostly) handles.
The night before my eye went I engaged in a furious slanging match. Now the eye would have gone anyway as I had got flashes the previous night which were the real sign something was up, and I knew I wasn’t feeling brilliant, but I couldn’t help myself getting involved.
There was one night shortly after Trump won when I couldn’t sleep because of it all. I turned on the computer and Labane posted about 4:40am and within about 20 minutes I had a big long reply replete with insults typed out and posted.
There’s no question that this is a microcosm of how world politics and world events have gone over the last decade or so. We all love the INTERNET but it has so much to answer for.
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