Retinal detachment surgery side effects

All,
My brother recently went to an ophthalmologist as he was seeing wavy
lines when looking at straight lines. He was diagnosed with retinal
detachment and was advised to undergo immediate surgery.
The surgery itself was claimed as being successful but he has two
serious side effects.
1. He's gone extremely myopic in the eye, reducing his vision to a mere
6-7 inches. This is almost blind!
2. His eye has "shrunk" giving an impression of having lost an eye, or
close to.

His doctor claims that these are normal side effects and the myopia can
be corrected via lenses or laser surgery.

Needless to say, we are _extremely_ worried about this situation.

He was a normal looking person and now he appears disfigured and is
almost blind.

Is this normal? What are his options now

Thanks a lot,
Sashi

 

Dr Judy,

Thanks for your advise. It does make me feel better. Is myopia an
expected and a common side effect?
How about the shrinking of the eye socket which is a kind of
disfigurement? Is this also common side effect?
Thanks,
Sashi

 

I had a retinal detachment and surgery to correct it in my right eye
about 15 years ago. I got a buckle (the band that Dr. Judy described).
It does lengthen the eyeball, causing both increased myopia, and in my
case, irregular astigmatism which is not completely correctable with
ordinary glasses or contacts. I was already extremely myopic (I could
only see about an inch), so I just got slightly stronger contacts. Was
your brother very myopic before the surgery?

I had this surgery about a year ago in the left eye. The doctor elected
not to put on a buckle, so I retained my 20/20 uncorrected vision in
that eye.

I didn't have that. It's true, though, that high myopia corrected with
glasses makes the eye look much smaller.

If your brother is myopic in one eye and not the other, he may wish to
consider contacts. It is very difficult, and sometimes impossible, to
see using glasses when the correction is very different.

 

My brother had perfectly good vision before the surgery and is strongly
myopic in the operated eye now.
As everyone has pointed out it's probably best to get it corrected via
laser surgery or corrective contacts.
The shrinkage is apparent without wearing any lenses whatsoever so it
doesn't have much to do with a corrective lens making it look
apparently small.
Looks like this might be an issue of phthisis bulbi, unfortunately.
Sashi
Sashi

 

In phthisis bulbi, the eye goes completely soft and blind. Is your
brother blind in that eye?

As has been mentioned before, the silicone "belt" the goes around the
eye has the effect of putting a rubber band around a balloon -- the eye
has no choice but to become elongated in the antero-posterior
direction, with the result that it becomes increasingly myopic. This
*may* have the visual effect of the eye looking smaller.

DrG