PRK - 5 weeks post-surgery

Wow, two blog posts in two days! Yes, there is an Arduino project in the works, but it's moving slowly!

Anyway, today was my five week checkup so it seems like a good time to give an update on my eyes. Things are continuing to go well. My doctor says I am starting to be able to read the 20-20 lines of the charts and everything is healing very nicely,

From my unscientific perspective, things have been going well especially this week. Lat week I was getting bad headaches almost everyday from eye strain, but this week things have gotten really much clearer and I haven't had a headache in days. I do now wear some store bought reading glasses when working on the computer or reading, but I can do pretty well without them. Maybe the heat wave helped somehow? Basically, the improvements are now on a week-by-week basis rather than daily, but improvements are still happening.

The best thing was being able to swim in our pool without having to worry about "where did I leave my glasses" and being able to dive and see underwater with a mask! Wow! It really does make me realize how profoundly blind I was without my glasses before.

Home Coffee Roasting

Since this blog is basically about any interesting project or skill I can pass along, I figured people might also be interested in learning about how to roast their own coffee in the comfort of their back deck!

Over the years we have gotten used to coffee roasting and production being a huge industrial process or else done by specialist boutique-y roasters with special machines and a fancy appreciation for roasts and blending. While it is true that roasting in bulk or hitting very exact roast points does require some specialist skill and machinery, the reality is that coffee roasting really isn't too hard - probably not much more difficult than making pop corn - and the results of really fresh, fresh roasted coffee make up for any imperfection in the home roaster's skills.

A great book on the subject is "Home Coffee Roasting: Romance and Revival" by Kenneth Davids which is available from Amazon in Canada here.

Here is a quick video of me roasting a batch of coffee on my barbecue using a big iron frying pan. As usual, I am sorry for the muddy audio!



With the lid opening and closing cycles, the total process is about 10 or 12 minutes.

Note: It is important to do this outdoors! The process will generate lots of pungent blue smoke that will fill up your house in no time. Also, it works best with the really high heat from a good gas barbecue.

Tools and materials:

Here is what you will need at least the way I do it (there are lots of variations):

•  Green coffee beans - these can be bought from Whole Foods in small batches to play with. For more variety and if you are in Canada I would recommend the Green Beanery . They have a very cool store in downtown Toronto and also great online ordering. Some Googling would find other suppliers too. Green beans will store in a cool place for over five years!
• A big cast iron frying pan. I believe I got mine from Canadian Tire (here). Often they are sold in the camping section. Do not use a non-stick pan! The high temperatures would ruin the Teflon coating.
• A metal colander to hold the beans after they are roasted. It must be metal! The beans will be over 500 degrees Fahrenheit when they are done.
• A long handled metal spatula for stirring the beans.
• Bowls and containers for the beans
• Very stout pot holders - I use silicon oven mitts.
• If you want to be fussy, a scale to weigh the beans out.
• A coffee grinder to process your roasted beans.
• That's about it!!

Process:

It's really pretty simple!

1. Put the pan on the barbecue and get it as hot as you can! Just leave it dry with no oil or anything in it. Close the lid and let it get up to at least 500 degrees F.
2. Measure out enough beans to cover the bottom of your pan. For me that's about 1/2 lb (250 gm).
3. Put the beans in the skillet and make sure they are in an even layer and not bunched up. The idea is to try to roast the beans as evenly as possible.
4. Close the lid and let the heat build up for a little while - maybe one minute.
5. Open up the lid and stir the beans around - especially try to flip them over so the tops and bottoms get heated.
6. Close the lid!
7. Open it up again and stir.
8. This cycle will continue for a while until you start to hear a bit of a crackling sound and see the beans start to smoke. This is called "First Crack".
9. Keep opening and closing and you will see the beans pass from greenish, to yellow to light brown and then start to get darker and darker and bigger and bigger. Interestingly, the smoke doesn't really smell a thing like the "fresh roast coffee" smell we are all used to from cafes and so on - it is more pungent - like burning a piece of toast with motor oil.
10. When the beans start to darken is when you need to use a bit of judgement - do you like lighter roasts or darker espresso or French roasts? Generally, when you hear an increase in crackling and see more smoke you are at "Second Crack". A this point you can leave them in a few seconds later before dumping them out if you want them to be a darker roast. Remember! The beans have so much internal heat built up, that they will roast a bit even after they are dumped out! You need to stop a bit before the final darkness of roast you want to achieve. This is really the hardest "art" of the whole roast.
11. When they are ready, dump the beans out into the metal colander and stir them up to move air through them and cool them as quickly as possible. You can also give a quick spritz of water - but not too much!
12. Once the beans have cooled down you can grind them and their peak flavor is actually about 24 hours after they are roasted and they will keep super fresh for up to two weeks. It is important to not store freshly roasted beans in a tightly sealed container - especially a glass one - since they will continue to out gas for a couple of days after roasting.

That's about it! 

PRK - 2 weeks post surgery

Well, today is two weeks and I just had a followup with my doctor, so it seems like a good time for a progress report...

In general, things are proceeding and each day is still slightly better, but then some days are better than others and the improvements are smaller. I do still get blurry vision, dry eyes this gives me a headache sometimes (like right now) - especially since my job requires a lot of computer screen time. At the end of the day it feel like I have had my contacts in for too long and it's time to take them out, but then I remember that isn't an option! On the other hand, I can drive again and when my vision is completely clear it is spectacular.

My eye doctor says everything is healing perfectly and looks great, but that it will likely take the more like 3 to 6 months for everything to fully clear up. The residual blurriness and so on is apparently because of minute swelling of the cornea as part of the recovery process. Naturally, I would have liked everything to be perfect by the end of two weeks, but my doctor makes the perfectly valid point that I did have 25% of my cornea blasted away by a laser and that takes some time to heal. A friend of mine who had PRK recommends keeping well hydrated, which does seem to help and is just good advice in general!

PRK - 1 week post surgery

So, it has now officially been a week post-surgery and things continue to progress albeit not in a completely linear fashion.

Today I realized I could once again read small magazine text without reading glasses and I was able to bump down the font sizes on my computer for the first time. Still, it is hard to work at the computer screen for extended periods and moving to focus from close to far objects is tough. I also still have halo'ing. My vision also seems to be clearer when I yawn, which I expect is because of the effect of tearing up slightly when I yawn. I also have to do lots of artificial tears.

Still, on the positive side, things are getting better each day and I am really liking have peripheral vision again like I did when I wore contacts many years ago! Not having to reach for my glasses in the morning or middle of the night is pretty cool. I am still getting used to my non-glassed face in the mirror when I shave. My wife says it is definitely a transition for her since she has only ever known me with glasses!

I also wanted to thank the two people who more than anyone (well, besides my surgeon, eye doctor & wife) have contributed to my recovery - Tom and Ray Magliozzi from Car Talk on NPR. I downloaded I don't know how many episodes of the show onto my iPhone and I've listened to them all back-to-back - especially earlier on when I pretty much couldn't do anything! If you aren't familiar with them, check them out at cartalk.com. I'm just waiting for my car to make a weird noise so I can call it in and have them laugh at me!

PRK - Post Surgery Day 5

Quick update today...

My doctor (and most of my reading on the surgery) said the recovery would not be linear and I guess today was the non-linear day. Things that were quite clear yesterday are very blurry again today - for instance I totally can't read the house addresses across the street. Even a moderate amount of computer work is very fatiguing and I have had to take some Tylenol for a headache.

Well, I will keep the faith that this will sort out over the next few days as everyone has promised. Tomorrow I am starting back to work, but I will definitely have to take frequent rests from the computer screen now and then.

I also picked up a pair of reading glasses today and for the 1st time got to utter the immortal phrase "Honey, have you seen my reading glasses?" Fortunately they weren't balanced on my forehead or something at the time!

PRK - Post surgery Day 4

Today has been a big improvement over yesterday. Immediately after getting up, my left eye still had the somewhat painful "eyelash" sensation, but by mid-morning that had gone away and today is the first day I haven't had to take any pain killers - just steroidal drops (which I will be on for months to come). My vision is getting better day-by-day. Today I could read the address numbers on houses next door!

I went for the last of the daily follow-ups with my doctor and, besides apologizing profusely for the incident yesterday, he said everything is healing up just as expected. The left eye is now a day or so behind the right eye because of tearing the epithelium, but it has healed up and is coming along. I still have a lot of haloing - especially with the left eye, but the improvement is very noticeable now. Amazingly, he said I actually would be legal to drive! Frankly, I still find the idea slightly terrifying and I would give it a few days yet before I will be back to driving.

So, all-in-all, good progress and now moving more quickly! I will likely stop posting about this every day now and just give periodic updates as my recovery continues.

PRK - Post Surgery Day 3

Well, a bit of a late post today because unfortunately the day hasn't gone so well.

Initially I had high hopes I would be getting the bandage contacts out today and all would be right with the world and my prescription would be starting to lock in somewhat. The doctor had told me to be sure to hit my eyes with artificial tears every five minutes for an hour before my appointment so that they would be well lubed up to slip out, which I dutifully did.

When I got there he did the usual microscope routine and pronounced the epithelium healed enough to allow taking the lenses out. He took out the right lens just fine, but when he went for the left lens it unfortunately tore at the new layer of skin. Amazingly, the pain is pretty much what you would expect from ripping freshly grown skin off your eyeball - excruciating.

For pretty much the whole day I have had to keep my left eye closed as much as possible since the sensation of opening it had been akin to having glass rubbed in my eye. Initially, I came home and had a Percocet which just caused me to have a very weird, hallucinogenic nap then later I had Tylenol and Tylenol with codeine. Now, about 7 hours after it happened I can keep my left eye open a bit while I type this, but it definitely still hurts a lot. Of course, this is pretty discouraging as well as painful since I was hoping today would really be when I turned a corner. I can read the shampoo bottle labels in the shower, which is more than I ever could without my glasses, so there is some progress.

The right eye does feel quite good, fortunately, but the prescription is still very off. My doctor says it should be starting to improve, but then he's the guy who just ripped the skin off my eyeball!