So my dad has just called me to say that my mum has a detached retina. She’s got an appointment with a consultant today and is hopefully going to having it operated on sometime Monday.

I know very little about the ramifications of this…will she make a full recovery? I hope so, she’s bloomin lovely 🙂

Yeah, theyre pretty good at these nowadays. Catching it early helps.

I detached my left retina Nov 2011 (MTB crash) but after a few months it was eventually determined it didn’t need surgery. Is she definitely having an op? An option they gave me before going for surgery (they left it a while to see if it got worse, which it didn’t) was a pirate-type patch to squish the eye and fix the retina to the back of the eye.

Where mine detached they said if I needed an op there was a 50% chance of permanent reduced (by 50%) vision when fixed, but only because it was one large tear, not, I suspect age-related with your mum, where it goes thin and patchy and IIRC there will be little vision loss, if any.

It was about 6 months until it healed to the point of not having black patches / partial loss of vision / flashes when I walked into a dark room, where the retina flaps around infront of the optic nerve and confuses it. Totally painless though (except the initial week!).

Nothing to worry about TBH, from what I saw when I was back and forth at the eye clinic place was the ops go really quickly and noone stays overnight 🙂

Can’t give an answer without a whole load of other information.
To start Macula on or off?
The real answer is …..wait and see… maybe.

Sorry I can’t be more specific.

Update, she had an emergency op on Friday. Initially all went well and they were confident that it would restore her sight. Fast forward to yesterday and she was taken back into hospital with problems due to a pressure build up. I’m still waiting to hear whether or not she has had to have another op today.

Hope it turns out well for your Mum, I had mine sorted 5 years ago, they installed a plastic cage to get the eye to the correct shape, and injected oil, as the ball of goo in the middle was tearing the back of my eye to peices, been fine since, took a long while to heal, initially very painful, even lifting a cup of tea hurt.