Kelly Potter

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Some of you may or may not know all of the back story that brings us to today so I’ll fill you in to the best of my recollection. 


Kelly was born premature. There was no explanation as to why expect that she was just plain impatient. :-) In the NICU she was given oxygen and as it was later understood- way too much oxygen. The excess of oxygen was said have caused her retinas to be thin. Seems a surprising side effect- I guess there is a such thing as “too much of a good thing”. 
Aside from that her eyes developed normally and she would used them constantly without issue as she was/is a voracious reader. 
 
When Kelly was a sophomore in highschool (15yo) she experienced a retinal detachment in her right eye.  Mary and Tom took her to a retinal specialist Dr Aashish Gandhi for a procedure called a scleral buckle.  Basically they sew a piece of silcone/sponge to the back of the eye to apply pressure and help reform the back of the eye to the  retina.


Fast forward about 10yrs and you would find Kelly and I living in Rehoboth,MA. She wakes up one Sat morning and mentions that she has a dark spot in her field of view in right eye. At the time a didn’t fully understand what was going on.  We found a specialist in Providence,RI and learned in short order that the retina (right eye) was detaching again. We were referred to another retinal specialist in Cranston,RI Dr. Salvatore Laporchio who we came to affectionately refer to as Dr. Portugal. Over the next 2 years we tried 5 times to save the retina in the right eye. Each time the surgery would go well. The gas bubble would do its job and between 2-4wks after the bubble would dissipate the scar tissue would take ahold of the retina and pull it off of the back of the eye. Finally in the spring of ‘11 before our wedding when the last ditch effort had failed we decided that it was time to stop. Every surgery destroys more and more of the viable retinal tissue (field of view gets smaller and smaller). Over the course of the next year or so the brain stopped processing what little info the right eye was still faxing in to the central office leaving her blind in one eye.


Not letting that slow her down she pursued a degree in nursing and has been a exemplary nurse on the cardiac floor of the very same hospital that she was born at (back in ‘84) for the last 3 yrs.


In late 2015. Petrified of what might happen to  Kelly’s left eye if she gave birth we sought the  consult of Dr Gandhi and true to his word there were no complications with her eye when she did give birth to our son Philip Kimball on 7/19/16.



Fast forward one more time to the beginning of May this year ( the week of Kelly’s B-day and she starts to complain of cloudyness in her left eye.  I suspected it was allergies and I think Kelly did to.  She had a standing annual appointment with Dr Gandhi (since returning to C/U she had started seeing him again) on that following Wednesday so she opted to do nothing. Eye drops didn’t relieve the haziness in the meantime. 


Dr. Gandhi found that a large clump of the vitreous gel had detached from her retina and it floating around in her eye as a solid mass was likely the cause of her cloudy vision. The options were to try to live with it or in some bad cases a surgery could be performed to remove the offending clump. The next day Kelly told me it was getting worse. She called the Dr and they decided to arrange for the surgery as it was impeeding her ability to perform her daily tasks at work.