Quick update for y'all from my previous post. My left eye, which had been completely swollen shut since Thursday morning, started to get unswollen enough to begin opening last night (Saturday night).
I basically spent all day (today, Sunday) sitting at home, napping, and iceing my eye and it has opened up a lot more. I was getting kind of worried earlier in the day because if I tried to open both eyes and use glasses I was getting really bad double vision. Basically everything in my left eye was tilted at about a 30° angle counter-clockwise, so if I tried to look at things with both eyes open it would be really blurry and I'd quickly get a headache. If I looked at things with just my left eye the angle of everything was still tilted, but my vision otherwise seemed fine.
I just took a pretty long nap, and after waking up things are much better. It still strains my eyes to look at things less than about a foot away, but my long distance vision seems pretty good and I can look at objects further than about 18 inches away without any double vision which was not the case this morning. It seems so far that the double-vision has been commensurate with the swelling around the eye. This jives with the research I've done online. Basically what happens is the swelling around the region will push the eye out of place and that's what causes blurred or double vision. So with any luck, once the swelling is fully subsided things will be fine.
I've read that untreated orbital fractures can cause permanently sunken or misplaced eyeballs. This is something that would be corrected by surgery. As far as I can tell right now my eyes don't appear to be sunken or misplaced, but I have a lot of blood in my cornea and there's still swelling so it's hard to tell exactly.
Tomorrow (Monday) I have what I had originally thought was actually going to be actual surgery, but is in fact just a consultation. That doctor should be able to answer most of the remaining questions I have about my healing, vision, recovery time, etc. I'm going to see Dr. Edward Miranda who is the doctor that St. Francis ER referred me to, and he's going to go over my CT scans, look at me, and then advise on what to do next. I checked out his Yelp reviews and he seems pretty highly rated except for people complaining about what health insurance he accepts and wait times in the office. As the referral doctor for ER, from what I could tell on Yelp he has a lot of experience with trauma problems like I have, so he's not "just" a cosmetic plastic surgeon. I already talked to an admin at his office on Friday and they verified that my health insurance plan covers things with my insurance policy at a rate that is acceptable to me.
Again, I won't know until tomorrow, but I read online that typically facial surgery for an orbital fracture happens 10-14 days after the fracture. They do this because they want swelling to be minimized in the region before attempting surgery. That would mean that if surgery is warranted it would probably happen next week.
I'm also going to call my optometrist tomorrow to see if I can get an eye exam. Last time I called I had a situation where I had lost my glasses and had no contacts (a really funny story for another time) and they were able to fit me into an appointment same day and get things worked out for me (i.e. they got me contacts that same day). I just visited them about a month ago and I believe I'm maxed out on my vision insurance for the year, but thankfully I'm in the financial position where if I have to pay out of pocket it will be no big deal. I did already get a really quick check at the ER on my left eye and they said it looked fine to them, but they didn't have all the fancy machines (or optometry expertise) that my optopmetrist has.
So far I've written this entire blog post with glasses on and both eyes open, which is the first time I've been able to use a computer with two eyes in about five days. So things are looking much better than before, and with any luck after tomorrow I'll have all of my further questions answered by real medical professionals.
Will update tomorrow after I talk to the professionals.