Mudville

There is a famous poem written by Ernest Lawrence Thayer called “Casey at the Bat”. It is a poem about baseball and how the hopes of one team rested on the shoulders of one man, the mighty Casey.

Here is the last paragraph of that poem:

“Oh, somewhere in the favored land the sun is shining bright, the band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;

And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout, but there is no joy in Mudville – mighty Casey has struck out.”

Well, my Mudville was at the Mayo Clinic and my mighty Casey was my Surgeon Dr. Holmes. A surgeon who specializes in double vision and who has been known to be able to pull off miracles. My hopes for single vision rested with him.
However yesterday he informed me of the following:

“We can’t fix your eye. The technology necessary to do it does not exist at this time.”

And with that statement my quest to be able to use my right eye once again ended with a thud.


In the end there was just too much damage done to the eye socket. In most cases double vision is either horizontal, vertical or a little of both. With surgery and/or corrective lenses they have an excellent chance of getting you back to single vision.

In my situation not only do I have both the horizontal and vertical issue, my eye is not sitting level. Due to this the image I see leans to the right and the degree that it leans to the right makes correcting it, at this time, improbable at best. Then there is an issue with scar tissue that has formed behind my eye. It is restricting my eye movement. This is where the missing technology comes into play. Today, they have no way of fixing this issue. They have tried to cut away the scar tissue with each surgery, but it always returns. It keeps my eye from moving naturally when I move my head up or down or side to side.
So what's next?

I will continue to do my physical therapy through the end of the year. After the first of the year we head back down to Mayo to see if my double vision has improved. We are not holding out hope for this, but they want to look at it one more time before moving forward.

Once they have ruled out any future procedures, then they are going to fit me for a special set of glasses. These will have a lens in the right eye that people will be able to see through when looking at me, but I will not be able to see out of. I will then rotate between the glasses and an eye patch depending on what I am doing or how I am feeling.
My life with monocular vision will officially start then.


How am I doing with all of this you may wonder? I am numb. I am disappointed. I am angry. This is not how I wanted this medical misadventure to end. Yes, I have always know that there was a really good chance that I would never regain the use of my right eye. It is just that I have had so many surgeries on this eye that I always expected that someway, somehow, I would get back to single vision.

Now that’s not gonna happen.
The mighty Casey has struck out.


Don't your feet get cold in the wintertime
The sky won't snow and the sun won't shine
It's hard to tell the night time from the day
You're losin' all your highs and lows
Ain't it funny how the feelin' goes away..
(Desperado  The Eagles)