Name: 7 Eye Surgeries Later - Steve Strope's Crazy Story of Having His Retina Fall Off
Uploaded: 2023-09-28T19:12:41.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video '7 Eye Surgeries Later - Steve Strope's Crazy Story of Having His Retina Fall Off' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-09-28. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video '7 Eye Surgeries Later - Steve Strope's Crazy Story of Having His Retina Fall Off' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-09-28. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan Experience.
You know, the stem cell thing, if he could, if Von Doom there, could get on
fixing the eyeball, I'd be very appreciative.
Let's tell everybody what happened to you, because this is a crazy thing.
Oh.
It's a real bummer, right?
You just out of nowhere started seeing dark spots, right?
No, what happened was, well, a little background.
I had already, stage one was going into your local Dr. Eye guy, because you
have metal in your eye.
Oh, wow.
Because that's some of the fun that happens, even when you're wearing safety
glasses.
All the haters calm down, we wear safety glasses.
How does it get in?
Oh, it just bounces around.
You know, you're working with a carbide bit spinning at, you know, 15,000 RPM,
stuff bounces around.
But since then, I've been using, I found this place in France that makes these
antique motorcycle
World War I aircraft goggles that seal.
Like the Nazis used to use for duels?
I don't know that one.
You don't know that one?
But it seals to your eyes, and it's got little vents in it so they don't fog up.
So, but anyway, I got metal in my eye, which is, for those of you who haven't
done it, it's
lots of fun, you hold still, you're wide awake, and they come at you with a Dremel
drill bit,
and they drill it out.
Oh, Jesus.
And you, and the instructions are, hold still.
Don't move.
Right.
Oh, my God.
I mean, they put a numbing drop in, but you still see the drill bit coming, and
yet, easy,
easy, you can handle it.
The stuff you've been through, I'm sure you can handle it.
Yeah, that's wild.
But so, so I've been drilled a couple of times, that sounds wrong, and it, if
they came up
with a photo of my eye, it'd look like a golf ball, little dimples when the
drill comes
in.
So, anyway, that guy is like, you know, when they're in there, if they're
experienced cats,
they just happen to look around, right?
Yeah.
And he goes, hey, I think you should come back and talk to our other doctor so-and-so
have him do some tests, because I saw some stuff, don't know, but I think it'd
be wise
if you, blah, blah, blah.
So, I go in, we do the test, and the guy goes, and this is, wow, this is a
while ago, 14, 15
years ago.
Here we are again with that time portal.
Right.
And he goes, you have advanced glaucoma.
Then I go, what the hell is that?
And he goes, it's like creeping death.
It slowly takes your peripheral, and most adults don't know that they're going
blind until
they're 80, and it moves so slow that you don't notice the change, right?
Well, mine's trucking along, and so we start with medication that lowers in
your eye, you
basically got a faucet and a drain.
And if the drain's plugged up, or if the faucet's on overload, it's acting not
like a water balloon,
but pressure builds.
That pressure is, think of your optic nerve, right?
Your brain is the cable TV company, your eye is the expensive flat screen TV,
and the cable
connecting the two of them, right?
That pressure building up is like somebody with a heel of his boot digging on
that cable,
and sooner or later, nothing, right?
So, you take medicine to reduce the pressure so it doesn't eat away at the
optic nerve.
Okay, great.
We got that under control.
We're killer.
So, then, probably eight, nine years ago, I have cataract surgery in my right
eye, and
put the cataract lens in, and it's like, oh my gosh, it's crystal clear and
beautiful and
incredible, you know?
Stoked on it.
About a year passes, and I'm at PRI, which is the race, real serious race
version of SEMA.
It's in Indianapolis, so there's no fuzzy dice there.
It's all race car parts and stuff like that.
And I'm walking around, and I just, I don't know how to describe it, but it
actually moved
in stages, like a curtain coming down of just gray, and then you just saw gray,
and it was
my retina falling off, detaching.
So, I'm in Indy, and I fly back and get together with the doctors, and they're
like, you got
to put that shit up.
And instead of doing the long version, I'll give you the short version.
Seven surgeries later, and every time you have the surgery, there's stitches in
my eye.
And that's fun.
That's way more fun than the drilling.
And you're laying face down for a week.
Oh, boy.
Can't move.
And it just kept falling off.
They couldn't go up, so I went to another surgeon.
I also have a buckle permanently sewn into my eye.
They try to change the shape of the eye to promote the retina staying up better.
Oh, boy.
So, anyway, got to new doctor, great guy, Dr. Asmali, back home in Cali, and he's
like,
I got this, man.
These other guys, they were losers.
We're going to get it up there, and we're going to stick it up.
That was surgery six, and it didn't hold, and he was more, I think he was more
depressed
than I was.
And so, we scheduled seven, and he sat down with me, I remember, before we went
into the
operating room, he goes, look, I don't think I can, I'm going to go try to save
your eye.
I'm not going to save your sight.
Wow.
Because, and he did it this way, which I thought was cool.
He went and did a little research to speak in my language, and he goes, when
you're trying
to weld metal, if both the pieces are kind of rusty and beat up or whatever, it
won't
weld very good, right?
And I go, true.
He goes, so you've got to have clean metal to clean metal to weld.
And I go, yes, that's true.
He goes, well, all the attempts have just frayed the living shit out of the retina,
so I'm
going to cut away the yucky stuff, and I'm going to have a new edge to, they
use a laser.
They basically, the only thing they know how to do is tack weld it up.
That's what they do, right?
So he goes, I'm going to make new clean edges.
I'm going to weld it up.
You're going to lose some sight at least because I'm taking away part of the
retina.
But I'm going to save your eye because if the eye, if we can't get something
going on in
there, then your body will kill off your eye.
It shrinks back.
It's painful.
Pop it out.
Put a glass eye in.
And I go, yeah, let's, yeah, let's not.
So he did that, and he goes, I cut away about a third of the retina, and I had
a visual,
like a vertical rectangle of sight, right?
Not all the way over to here to here, here to here, but fast forwarding, scar
tissue moved
over and pretty much just eliminated.
And they're like, we can go in and, no, no, no.
We're not going to go in and do anything.
So this one's basically gone.
You know, that's that for now.
We'll see if science checks in.
Do you know who Michael Bisping is?
No, sir.
Michael Bisping is one of the toughest human beings that's ever walked the face
of the earth.
Fair enough.
This is what I said, and not just because he was a UFC middleweight champion,
but because
Michael Bisping fought the last 10 fights of his UFC career, including winning
the title
blind in one eye.
And he didn't tell them.
He hit it.
Oh, I heard about that.
Yeah, he hit it.
He didn't tell anybody.
Do you know, gangster, you have to be, to want to be fighting the best fighters
in the
world, Dan Henderson.
And not being able to see over here.
Anderson Silva, and you can't see out of one eye.
Like his, his one eye is gone, man.
Yeah, I understand.
Which is fighting world-class fighters that you can see his right eye is
completely missing.
It's like, it's just foggy.
Yeah.
He wears like a little thing that goes over it, like a lens.
So it looks normal.
But he's a fucking stud.
That guy fought 10 fights with one eye.
I mean, just think of a fight with two eyes is fucking terrifying.
Yeah.
And fighting against the best guys in the world.
And he wins the title.
Knocks out Luke Rockhold with one eye.
Yeah.
Well, it took a lot.
I would sit there and practice like basketball into garbage cans just to try to
retain the-
Death perception, right?
Death perception.
That's the real issue, right?
Yeah.
It's difficult.
And then also it's, it's frustrating when you're, so anyway, the, the fun, I'll
interrupt myself to continue with the fun.
So now I'm where I'm at, right?
And they're like, your other eye is going to need cataract surgery.
Oh, Jesus Christ.
And I'm like, so I did ask when the retina fell off, hey, did the cataract
surgery have anything to do with that?
Possibly, you know?
And every doctor and every specialist and everybody I talked to all said the
same thing.
I'm paraphrasing.
Well, any procedure on your eye may, could, might, possibly have the
possibility of-
Like one of them commercials for like a pharmaceutical drug.
You know, so it's like, did the operation on your eye cause the retina fall off?
Uh, anything could, maybe.
Anything could, maybe.
So anyway, so now I've got to have cataract surgery on this one.
I got a great guy who's one of the best in the West Coast.
Uh, et cetera, et cetera.
We do the surgery and there is a mistake in, cause they're, account for my
pressures.
They tried to keep the pressures low cause of my glaucoma.
Well, they went a little too far and my pressures were down to, your normal
eyes run, like your eyes probably run at like 20, 22, you know, maybe even a
little bit higher, but right around there for pressure inside.
We'll call it, we'll call it, we'll call it air pressure.
You know, it's not the right term, but so mine with medication, we keep it down
at like 13 and 12, right?
Okay.
So, um, when, after the second cataract surgery, the one on the one working eye,
they had dropped the pressure so low.
I coughed and it blew out blood vessels inside my eye, which when you wake up
and you look, it looks like it's snowing inside your, it looks like it's snowing.
And I'm like, what the hell's going on?
And at the same time, we did a special little surgery to like drill out the
drain tube because in my eyes, the faucet's wide open and the drain tube's
plugged.
Oh boy.
That builds the pressure.
So the medicine turns the faucet down and clears away the drain tube, right?
So we drill out the drain tube.
I'm over, I'm making this, I'm sure there's eye guys listening.
Well, that's not technically, look.
They drilled the damn, they drilled the damn tube open.
So all the blood goes down and plugs that.
So that ruined that.
Yay.
And so they rush me and they basically take a needle and insert fluid into my
eye.
I'm wide awake, mind you.
Just two little, you ever been where the two handles under the table?
Oh yeah.
You grip on them?
Yeah.
Oh my God.
Motherfucker.
Does he have your head secured or anything?
No, you just put it in the little foamy breeze.
Oh boy.
So they do that and that was miscalculated and the pressures went to like 62.
And I, I was, I was, um, what's the word?
Terrified?
No, I, I was throwing up.
I couldn't stand up.
I was so disoriented because it was, I mean, it was screwing with the deal.
And so the doc who, again, great guy.
I'm still, I'm not slamming him.
And he actually met me at his office.
So like, I don't even know when it was three in the morning or, and, and I'm
throwing up
in his bushes out front.
Oh my God.
Right.
And he did this three times, head in the thing, hands on the handle, took a
blade, lifted
my eye and let the, let the pressure out, let the, the fluid out.
So I'm like digging that.
Right.
So now we get the pressures under control.
Right.
And so that was, uh, uh, two to three years ago.
And believe me, every day when I wake up and I can see, Mike, is this the day
this retina
falls off?
Am I going to have a repeat of the last one?
Oh my God.
I have clammy hands.
I really do.
I'm the one to live in through it.
You don't have to worry about it.
You're good.
Yeah, but still it's for you.
Yeah.
It's, you know, but it's like anything else when someone has something, they,
uh, when
sitting is always over your shoulder, you can either focus on it and worry
about it or just
go to the shop and build some cool cars, you know?