One Last Chance.. A Surgery Update

Sorry about the back to back posts, but I wanted to give you an idea of what the world looks like with double vision. I also wanted to give a quick update on what is going on and I didn't want to try to do that in one post.
So how is it going you ask?
Well the good news is that I still have a chance. It's a pretty slim chance at best, but there is a chance. If I want to get back to singular vision then I am pretty much gonna need a miracle. Working in my favor though is that I will be in the hands of a gifted Mayo Clinic surgeon who, everyone I talk to believes, can work miracles. Lets hope he has one more left.
So where did the wheels come of this time? I was at the Mayo Clinic meeting with the orbital surgery and plastic surgery teams when I heard that damn sentence again.
"I am sorry Mr. Engnell but there is nothing we can do to fix your eye".
The concern is where the eye is located and the amount of work that would need to be done. In their words, they have a better chance of leaving me blind in that eye then they do fixing it the location of the eye. I have now heard this from North Memorial, the University of Minnesota and now the Mayo Clinic. So there will be no more surgeries on the orbital bone and the placement of my eye. It is where it is and we will go forward with what we have.
So what does this mean?
Since my eyes can not be aligned the chances of having a single field of vision are pretty much gone. Yet they all say if anyone can pull it off it would be this one surgeon at the Mayo Clinic. He will need to catch some luck but he has done it before. The risk here is that we are probably only going to get one shot at it. So the surgeon will do his best, but close might be the best that we can hope for.
If he can't get me to single vison but can get it close, then he feels that they can create a set of glasses that can correct the double vision. We wont know anything for sure until I am in the operating room. Again, close might be the best that I can hope for.


The surgery is set for October 9th.
I need to be down there on the 8th so they can do pre-opt work. The morning of the 9th is the surgery. The afternoon of the 9th they will do the eye adjustments. I have to be back on the 10th for final adjustments and then they send me home.


Doing the surgery will be a tall lanky Brit named Dr. Holmes (and no his first name is not Sherlock, but that would have been really funny).

He comes highly recommended and is the one surgeon most hospitals and doctors end up recommending for their seeming impossible or miracle needing cases. I guess I now fall into both those categories.

Dr. Holmes has done it before! Pulled off a miracle that is. Many times if you asked other doctors.

I actually met one of his patients.

Not at the Mayo Clinic but at the state fair of all places. I was listening to a band when this lady walks up to me and starts asking me about my eye and what I was planning on doing to fix it. It turns out she needed a miracle too. She was born with double vision and had it throughout her life. She had multiple surgeries but was never able to get one that fixed her vision. She was finally told she would have double vision for the rest of her life. Then someone recommended she try the Mayo Clinic. So a few years ago she contacted them and they introduced her to Dr. Holmes. He was able to correct her vision to the point where she only needs contact lenses to see perfectly our of both eyes.

“My amazing miracle man” is how she described him.

I don’t remember her name. I don’t remember where she was from, but here is the picture that was snapped of us at the state fair. She gives me hope that there is still a chance.

Let’s hope Dr. Holmes has one more miracle in his pocket.

We spotted the ocean at the head of the trail
Where are we going, so far away
And somebody told me that this is the place
Where everything's better, everything's safe

(Walk On The Ocean  Toad The Wet Sprocket)