Jamie O’Brien before and after pterygium surgery. Photos: YouTube//Screenshot
If you’re fair haired and light-eyed and you spend a lot of time staring at bright things with wind and saltwater pelting you, you might have noticed a strange slug-looking thing creeping across your eye. It’s fairly common in surfers who surf a lot, and it’s called a pterygium. Guess what it’s more commonly called? Surfer’s Eye. Jamie O’Brien has it pretty bad… or did, at least.
A pterygium is a benign growth that usually starts in the corner of your eyeball and grows towards the center of the eye. It’s likely a way for the body to protect the eyes from the elements, but it can be red and painful. If it gets big enough, it can impair your vision, so pterygium surgery is necessary. Which is why O’Brien needed to go under the knife.
“I’m super nervous,” Jamie said after his last session for the foreseeable future. Sadly, that session was not a great one. “I’ve been trying to put it off for a long time — maybe a couple of years — and it just kept getting worse and worse and worse… I don’t really want to do it, but I have to because it’s going to affect me in a big way.”
The surgery requires that the patient doesn’t let water touch their eye for the first week. Like no water at all. Not even shower water. Definitely not ocean water for at least a month, if not longer. The reoccurrence rate is around 50 percent, as well, so it’s not a surgery to take lightly.
“This is going to take me out of the water for potentially six or more months,” O’Brien said from the hospital waiting room. I’m not exactly sure; it all depends on how the surgery goes. Everything has been kind of bothering me. When I wake up in the morning, everything is kind of blurry, so it’s time to take care of it. Hopefully it’s not longer than six months, because that would be pretty hard for me to not to be able to go fishing or surfing or do the things I really love.”
After the surgery was all done and Jamie had been been scraped clean of his eye slug, he began his recovery. After five days, the patch was off and he gave a quick update on his condition.
“It sucks,” he said, his eye shut tightly. “Today is day five or six of this. I still can’t open my eye.”
Heal up quick, Jamie. There are waves to ride and fish to catch.
