I’m jealous of you, and your brain.
Lots of internet buddies rooting for you which might seen superficial. But it’s not. It’s as real as Irish empathy gets I reckon. You’re very valued.
Do something different tomorrow. Shake it Up as Taylor Swift said.
This post makes me emotional because some of the people here who lets say probably wouldnt share my political views (well, at least if you read here) have done things for me or people i know that were beautiful (hello ironmoth and johnnysachs, i hope the knee is recovering).
You’re objectively a great writer. You’re wasted here.
You’ll feel better soon. I guarantee it
I’m home end of the month so you’d better get your togs out. It’ll be nice and fcuking freezing too.
Pussy
@cheasty, we all need a purpose in life, something to get us out of bed and the juices flowing. Writing these articles would give you something to look forward to and a healthy distraction from your health woes. You have a gift (and its not lads saying it to blow steam up your ass or trying to make you feel good), and a gift that should be shared beyond the confines of our little community here.
We all wish you well, and have a genuine concern for you.
@Cheasty Really sorry to hear of your struggles. I’d be wary to advise you how best to cope but one thing I will say is that you’re gifted and valued.
All jokes aside.
@Cheasty is a brilliant writer. No matter the subject he drags you in deep and you read on to the end.
He holds a tune as the saying goes.
It seems the only person here who doesn’t believe that @Cheasty could make writing a career is the only person that actually matters,
In all my years on forums I’ve never read more interesting content, it’s the content rather than the style for me, a superb gift of weaving memory and current events, nostalgia sells.
Assuming you’re posting is generally off the cuff instantaneous stuff imagine what you could produce over a full day if you needed to come up with 1000 words, say on the death of John Motson last week, that was a Tour de Force of writing.
There’s nothing I can do to help you in the real world, but I wish you well, for all the good it does 
Did you ever read Glory Days? It’s a great book. I think you could do something like that and do a superb job on it.
Jeez, i wouldnt consider myself much of a writer Cheasty, most of my ramblings are inoffensive, bland, fence splitting harmless shit. I’ll be your Notts County there, a harmless aul side who did fuck all. But appreciate the nod all the same bud.
As you know I was reading that and finished it a few months ago. It’s good and I enjoyed the Ice Hockey but to be honest got bogged down in all the Basketball, it’s main focus.
Anyway, an Irish equivalent would be certainly worth a read. Focusing on Gaelic Sports, a bit of soccer across the sea and athletics. You’d just have to pick a year.
Who won the hurling in Thurles in 1984 again?
You don’t want to read any of this because it’s a long, self pitying rant of the kind that I have written numerous times before at this stage, but it has at least whiled away the last hour and a half for me writing it. Next week is six months since my eye failed and I’m as bad now as at any stage since, a different kind of bad than before, a darker, more resigned sort of bad. The days seem longer and harder to fill and my ability to fill them seems less and less and my appetite for each day less and less and my hope is less and less, I have no hope at all.
I more and more dread going out for walks, because I see double vision everywhere. I mainly cower in a not particularly comfortable armchair, sometimes I shake, sometimes I desperately squint trying to make my eye see straight (always failing), sometimes I bang my head off the back of the chair. I mainly go to bed at night at about one or half one and lie there awake for four or five hours. It’s usually bright by the time I eventually fall asleep, if I do fall asleep at all, and sometimes I don’t.
All the stuff I write here, apart from on this thread, is an escape into a fantasy world where none of this has happened. An attempt to create a split “normal” personality, to compartmentalise pain away into a box and forget about it even for a short while. But the box is overflowing.
I’ve had long online conversations with other people who were in the same position as me but are now a couple of years past their macula off detached retinas, and this doesn’t get much if any better. The slanting and squiggly lines are not going to abate. The micropsia, the perception of things being smaller and looking further away than they are, is not going to abate. “Dougal, these are small, but those are far away” is now my life. Flat looking cars. Road signs that look 20-30% smaller than they are, depending on which angle I look from. GAA posts that look like they have giant forks and ribbons hanging out of them. Every time I look at this forum, each poxy circle yoke has a smaller, out of shape duplicate two inches across the screen, or outside the boundaries of the screen.
I’m trying to get a second opinion but yet I’m not trying. I emailed my surgeon about three weeks back explaining that I wanted a second opinion elsewhere and would he refer me to Dara Kilmartin in the Beacon, but the reply didn’t address the query. A lady in Specsavers said she would refer me to this Kilmartin chap and supposedly she has written to him but I haven’t heard anything back yet. I don’t ring anybody, my Mam rings, because I’m dead inside.
I don’t even know the point of getting a second opinion, because I already know what the answer will be. My mild epiretinal membrane is not causing my horrible distorted vision, dead and malfunctioning photoreceptors are, and photoreceptors cannot ever regenerate, no more than the spinal cord can regenerate. I know what the problem is because I am smart and can process information and can match it up against the personal experience of what I am seeing, and the personal experiences of others. The words “successful retinal detachment surgery” are Orwellian. My professional tip for life is: never, ever, ever, ever get a detached retina, especially a macula off detached retina, because a macula off detached retina means bye bye normal vision in your eye forever and hello a life of squiggles and double vision. When you have a macula off detached retina, it’s like trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. It doesn’t happen. You don’t want to lose your eye, that seems a like a nightmare, but sometimes you think you might be better off without it, because this is a nightmare, and every morning you wake up and think “oh no, not again”.
I cannot accept this is my position and my lot in life going forward. If only you knew the spectacular level of stupidity that led me into allowing my eye to fail and destroy my life. How do you deal with a seven week long car crash where you made choices and non-choices which destroy your life forever? Choices like deciding not to google “floaters” when you got new floaters, floaters which you immediately knew were a warning something was wrong. Choices like deciding not to google “detached retina” when you’d been warned you were at risk of a detached retina seven years earlier, and you now had floaters. Choices like deciding not to go an optician which is five minutes away in a car, who would have diagnosed a problem immediately and sent you to an opthalmologist who would have dealt with it routinely, given you a few blasts of a laser and saved your sight. Having seven weeks to do this, and never doing it. It would have been as simple as going to the supermarket. Choices like lugging extremely heavy tree trunks around a garden with a torn retina. Choices like destroying yourself drilling holes seven feet up into a wall while having a torn retina. Choices like deciding to watch porn online for six hours after you’d got lightning bolt flashes in your eye the previous night, when you knew in your heart of hearts your eye was about to disintegrate. Watching porn instead of going to the hospital as your eye was disintegrating! Could you live with that? Then drinking and smoking on your own that night! And then your eye goes blind hours later. Even then, still denial. It took me ten hours to make it to a hospital after I woke up with a blind eye, and even then, I only got in as they were about to close up for the day.
And that’s it, squiggly lines and grotesquely impaired vision for the rest of your life. No comeback. Because you did all this. You DON’T deal with it.
I curse my luck, curse that I was alone in a house when all this happened and couldn’t bring myself to ring anybody to get advice.
Literally none of this has to do with my mental health, not the after part at any rate. The before, how I allowed this to happen, had everything to do with my mental health. But what is there now is the rational knowledge that you’re fucked and that YOU CAUSED IT. That’s what fucks you. You don’t deal with any of this and it’s rational not to be able to. Being able to deal with it, that would be the mental illness, the delusion.
“Chin up, things will improve”. “You’ll be fine.” “You should be happy your sight was saved.” None of this deals with the reality that when you lose your central vision in your eye and YOU are to blame for it, that is an essential part of your being ripped out, by your own hand. Your eyes can’t cry but your heart and your flesh are crying, they do nothing but cry.
The evenings are lengthening and spring has sprung, even though you’d barely know it, and now it’s even harder to deal with, because spring and summer are not for me this year, or any other year. I will not attend Galway v Kerry next Sunday, which will signal the beginning of the summer and will symbolise hope and optimism and will be a celebration of human life and human abilities which are now gone from me, a celebration of the present and the past and the future. No Dublin v Kerry for me this year. No summer days. No more of that. For me, a mental and physical prison cell.
The Sunday night about four weeks ago when I was in a bad way and ended up going to that community cafe thing in spite of myself, the Gardai called to my house that night, around 3am, because somebody in Dublin had alerted them after I put up something on Facebook, somebody who knew my address. I don’t believe it was anybody from here, I think I know who alerted the Gardai. I talked to two Gardai in the front room for half an hour. I don’t know why I’m mentioning this, just to say that it happened. That’s where I am.
I had to go out on Saturday to get vapes, as I’m going through several hundred pulls on my vape every day, maybe 500 pulls, and going through over a bottle of liquid a day, maybe two bottles. God it was so depressing. People in pubs and outside pubs in Woodquay, I could overhear the commentary of the France v Wales match. On the way back I went into Woodies on the Headford Road to try and get some rope. It took me 15 minutes to find where the rope was in the shop, and then I hummed and hawed and looked at the prices of the various ropes they had. One roll of rope was 30 quid, but then I looked down and saw another that had a price tag of 2 quid in front of it. I’m not familiar with buying rope, in some ways I’m extremely stupid and self-conscious, and this confused the hell out of me. How much should I pay for the rope to take me out of all this? Should I go with the comfortable one, the expensive one? Go out in a modicum of style and comfort. Or could I get a bargain, 2 euro to end my own life? I’d been stood there in front of the various ropes for five minutes, and I just said to myself “to hell with this” and I shuffled out of Woodies without buying anything and then walked slowly to buy some cans of Harp and walked home and drank one can of Harp while flicking between the rugby and the GAA on my laptop (I can’t watch television) and made some smart alecky comments on here to mask my turmoil.
I’m going to be on my own tomorrow and Wednesday because my brother is going up to Dublin to the Ireland game, and my Mam is going up as well to attend to some business. I’m quietly planning what I’m going to do when they’re gone. Go down to Woodies for the rope. This is in one part of my brain. Or the other part of my brain may win, and I may just decide to be a lazy sod and sit alone and drink or type rambling nonsense about the Twitter accounts of GAA players or number ones in the 1970s or which team were the fifth favourites to win the league before the 1978/79 English football season. And then the cycle of despair will renew itself.
Don’t do it pal.
Hey sid I’m back next week. Go out and buy swimming togs instead. Don’t do anything til you’ve frozen your bollox off. I’ll pick you up probably weds afternoon.
The only thing I can think to say to you is that you appear to enjoy writing. And have a talent for it, as nearly everyone acknowledges. You should try to keep a record of what you are going through in diary form because I think you might find there is publishing interest in such an account.
Whether you would have an interest in such a path is obviously a matter for you and you alone. But sifting through stuff in writing can be a help. Only a possibility, I realize.
Try and mind yourself. From what you say about vaping and insomnia, you need to talk to your GP. Bad sleep patterns would wear down anyone.
Please check yourself in and stay in until you feel a bit better
Sorry to hear you’re struggling.
What’s your eyesight like if you close your bad eye? If it’s OK what about an opaque contact lens that blocks vision in that eye, think they’re called occluding lenses.
Plus one @Cheasty. You’ve written on here how you’ve flirted with it many times now, but you want to keep living and you should. Get yourself the help you need and deserve.
This is one option but it’s one I don’t want to yet consider as it would effectively amount to an admission that I’ve cost myself the eyesight in one eye, and that is something I cannot accept.
There are things called scotogenic lenses, but this too is a variation on the same theme, these to the best of my knowledge are lenses which have an occlusive bit in the middle but allow you to keep the peripheral vision in the eye.
I had an operation called a vitrectomy, where the vitreous is removed from your eye and a gas bubble inserted. Nearly everybody who gets a vitrectomy gets a cataract in the eye at some point over the following year or two, I haven’t yet developed one. Some people say that after the cataract is operated on and an intra-ocular lens is inserted into the eye, they improve a lot, however I don’t believe this will happen in my case, as my problem is distortion, not blur. An IOL will improve your lot if your problem is blur (haziness basically) as a result of a poor basic visual acuity. The worst of all worlds is where you have good visual acuity but distortion that badly impacts your vision, because the image is too strong to suppress precisely because of that good basic visual acuity. This is what I have.
I have a notion there is a possibility I could look at undercorrecting the bad eye with a lens - ie. to get it to a situation via lenses where the right eye does all the heavy lifting but the left eye sort of piggy backs on it, but the bad eye image is able to be suppressed.
At the moment my binocular fusion is fucked, I can’t bring images together, the overall vision is polluted by the distorted image from the bad left eye, and then that image from the left eye wanders off to the right.
Another thing that is stressing me a lot is that I have a thing called a posterior vitreous detachment taking place in my good eye. This is how nearly all retinal detachments happen. The vitreous disintegrates and pulls away from the retina. The point of strongest adhesion by the vitreous to the retina is up at the peripheral point near where the retina meets the front of the eye and that’s where retinal tears are most likely to happen That’s what happened in my bad eye and if you leave a retinal tear develop it can progress to a retinal detachment. In my good eye the vitreous has pulled away from the centre part of the retina (occasionally that can cause a macular hole) but it has yet to pull away from the periphery of the retina, which is the danger spot. If I get a retinal detachment in my good eye - and people who have had one in one eye are at an elevated risk of one in the other eye - and I wouldn’t be able to read at all.
Have you put any thought into trying something with psilocybin in it?
Would you listen to a few podcasts on it or listen to a YouTube video on the topic? Nothing to lose
