So I Had My Eyes Ultrasounded Yesterday

Last Updated on: 14th July 2022, 09:28 pm

My eye ultrasound was yesterday, and since you’re reading this so soon, it means I didn’t die or get seriously maimed during the process. Yay!

I was a little worried about things in the days leading up to it just because I didn’t know what to expect. I can handle different types of doctor induced pain fairly well, but people messing with my eyes always makes me nervous even when the one doing the messing is me. It also didn’t help that the descriptions in the comments were so wildly different. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate people trying to put me at ease/save my life, but it’s hard to feel reassured when you’ve got an imagination of your own and you’re dealing with such extremes.

First there was this, from L-Squared.

Good luck with all this, Steve. I had an eye ultrasound for the first time (that I can remember) earlier this year, and – geek that I am – I thought it was kind of neat. I had it done for a similar reason; my surgeon wanted to get a better idea just how messed up my left eye really is before she went poking around in there. She had me lay back in a reclining chair and close my eyes. Then she smeared my eyelids with some thick, cold jelly stuff, and then she ran the little probe thing all over them – asking me to move my eyes one direction or another if I could, to help her get a good look at everything. The ultrasound probably took a little longer with me than the average person, just because I couldn’t hold most of the eye positions she asked for. But the whole thing was relatively quick and mostly painless.

That doesn’t sound too bad, does it?

But then this happened by way of W. S. G.

Ugh not to be a gloomy little raincloud but I hope that they’ve changed ocular ultrasound technique or something in the past 10+ years because when I had one it was a very miserable experience…. Though for me, they numbed my eye and then held the lids open, dribbled some vaseline like goo on it then ran the ultrasound probe across the surface of my eye. And my technition was a newbie and they would get distracted and get kind of heavy handed. At least they had a fluffy white cat stuffed animal for the victums to squeeze and mangle while going through this…. I was aching for days after.
Having your eye closed for it would make a huge difference I imagine though as I’m sure a lot of the pain was caused by your body naturally taking offense to having something rubbing your eye and not being able to close it/pull away.

That sounds ungood. Very, very ungood. And knowing my luck, I figured it’d be what I would be in for.

It wasn’t, thank Christ.

What I had done was something called a B-scan, and it was totally painless…at least for me. As for the poor woman who had to perform it on the other hand, I’m not so sure. My eyes, because they’ve sat there for 34 years not needing to focus on anything, just do whatever the fuck they want whenever they wanna do it. So when somebody’s telling you to look up and right, straight ahead, down and left and wherever else and you can’t, it makes it hard to get good, clear images. I’m sure I was the biggest pain in the ass patient she’s had to deal with in a long time. We ended up making fun of it and she was pretty cool about it, so that was nice. But it didn’t help that nobody bothered to tell them ahead of time that it was going to be an issue. Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference, but original specialist guy could have at least brought it up, just in case. Granted I’m not a doctor or a technician, but by the way, you’re going to be taking photos of a moving target for a test that isn’t designed for that on Monday afternoon seems like kind of an important detail.

Ah well, at least it’s over. Now I get to wait again. They told me that it could take 10 days give or take a few to get the results back to original specialist guy, who will then take as long as he’s going to take to look at them, at which point I may or may not hear anything. I hope I hear either way. Even if he decides he’s still not touching it, I’d like to know. Leaving a guy hanging when there’s even the faintest possibility of surgery isn’t cool.

Oh, and if you read the description I linked to, it’s worth noting that they didn’t numb my eye ahead of time. There was no need, since they didn’t even go in. It’s all done from the outside like the rest of it says it is. I wonder if they generally do numb people for that test and why they didn’t in my case.