Kes and Alexx go to the Ocularist

[alexxkay]

At long last, kestrell was able to get fitted for her new prosthetics. She asked me to document the process, so I took lots of pictures. A few of them may not be for the squeamish!

The ocularists are still a little un-hip about the whole 'Delerium eyes' thing, so have been largely cropped out of the photos.

Taking the T there.


In the waiting room.


Sitting in the examining chair.


Folding up the cane.


Kes hisses at me for taking her picture with no prosthetics in, when her eyes look sunken.


The first 'tray', through which they will pump the molding clay, has been inserted.


Both trays are in.


Injecting clay into the left eye socket.


...and the right.


Clay has been injected, now waiting for it to set.


Removing the molds.



Wow, this uploading process takes a long time, and I'm paranoid that LJ will eat the post. So I'm going to split this into multiple parts.

ETA: Locking comments due to spammers. If you want more info about this, please contact me privately.

Comments

Ocularists/eyes

[megan claffey santos (from livejournal.com)]

I just stumbled upon this journal, I am going to introduce myself as Megan a mom of a child with a prosthetic eye (she lost her eye to retinoblastoma at 15 month and now is three and a half years old). Her Rb doctor directed me (and all of his enucleated Rb patients) to an awful ocularist. One doesn't need a license to practice or anything in Florida-heck, even I could call myself and ocularist here. Well since we knew nothing about prosthetics, we trusted our specialist to lead us in the right direction. Come to find out, this man is putting prosthetics in children's sockets that are so big even he needs a metal surgical instrument to remove the eye. He also managed to enlarge the eye by adding base wax at every appointment and shove the eye back into her socket without looking at it and send us on our way. If we tried to ask questions-he was flippant and defensive. She was plagued by discharge and what we later found out, infections. We also found out the eye was so big that the antibiotic drops could not effectively reach the socket.

We have been seeing a new and wonderful ocularist for a while now and my daughter now has a new prosthesis made by him. It is different in feel and very well done (even though he worked off her old shape as to not "shock" her with something completely different). I am not convinced her old eye wasn't a stock eye that was then painted.

So I guess my questions are how did you find out who was up to date and who was not? I mean, our former "quack" of an ocularist is an associate member of the ASO-which means he has taken some classes with them, but to what extent? Obviously as a mother, I am very upset this man even can still practice and he has the biggest practice in FL-seeing 150-200 patients a week. (he is also the only ocularist in FL that works with insurance companies.)

That comes to the last thing I was going to share with you about HMOs. We got a gap exception to see our new ocularist. You need to call your doctor and have them put in the request to the insurance company. It didn't pay for all of the $2000, but most of it.

Re: Ocularists/eyes

[kestrell.livejournal.com]

When I was a kid, from age 3-18, I had an ophthalmologist who was really a jerk, caused me a lot of physical pain during exams, got defensive about this and expressed anger at any complaint I had, and often refused to answer my questions. I say this to explain that I understand how helpless one can feel in trying to make what is already a difficult medical process less awful and have some agency over whom one goes to. I am also just incredibly appalled at how this field gets so little regulation.

That being said, I have two general guidelines:
1. This process should not be painful. I still get really tense whenever the ocularist touches my eyes, probably because I have so many bad associations with previous eye specialists, but the bottom line is, it's not painful. Also, I've gotten a lot better: when I first came to this ocularist, he would offer to give me five-minute breaks to just relax because I was so terribly tense by the entire procedure. This is another sign of a good specialist: he treats your response with respect andnot with defensiveness or anger.
I mentioned this in one of my posts on my own blog: if the procedure is causing you pain that is not inherent to the condition itself--as from an infection or other complication--then the ocularist is not doing it right. If the prosthetic causes pain--as opposed to some *slight* sense of it being too large when first put in--then the prosthetic is not sized correctly. If it pokes uncomfortably at a corner or a contact point on the lid, the ocularist should be tweaking the prosthetic and not ignoring you.
Which leads to rule
2. The ocularist, like any other medical specialist, should be treating you with respect and consideration for complaints of pain or infection. I understand that it's difficult to change ocularists since they seem to operate mostly outside of being answerable to anyone, but I encourage folks to keep complaining about awful and abusive service--tell the eye doctor who referred you, tell any hospital which is associated with referring patients, try the Better Business Bureau or the state office which deals with poor business practices--I'm zoning on which office this is, the attorney general, I think? Even if one can't make these charlatans ansewrable, I hope that the accumalated weight of such complaints may result in these people someday having to answer to someone on a legal level.

Re: Ocularists/eyes

[(Anonymous)]

Hi-
I am worried because my husband is changing ocularists.
I know you don't want to name names, but what city is he in, please?