Wood Eyes and Smiley Lies

For a few years, I had been satisfied enough with retina specialist Harold Woodcomb, and not just because he had promised to issue medical clearance if the DMV ever denied licence based on my being blind in one eye.
On one prior visit to Woodcomb’s Retina Consultants, Inc office, I had been seen by a new doctor on staff, a Doctor Smiley. He looked at the retina and wanted to rush me into PRP surgery that night based on his exam. He used the tagline I had heard from several doctors over the prior twenty years: "If we don’t do this surgery, you will be blind in six months."
Maybe I am a jaded cynic because I had heard that before. The threat is always so precisely the same. "Blind in six months."
What was most galling about hearing it this time is that if Dr. Smiley had bothered to look at my records that resided in his own office, he would have seen that the primary partner in Retina Consultants, Inc, –Dr. Woodcomb himself– had reported my situation as stable and in need of monitoring but not surgery. Obviously, Smiley could not have been too interested in reviewing medical history even as established in his own office before starting new and expensive procedures.
And yes, the Smiley Incident was well prior to six months before the vitreous hemorrhage.
I refused to even consider being seen by Dr. Smiley again. Judging by the Retina Consultants, Inc website, he no longer seems affiliated with the office.
Despite the half-hearted defense of his associate that Woodcomb later gave, I gave Dr. Woodcomb the benefit of the doubt. I turned to him first when the hemorrhage popped blood in my eye.
I had trust and faith in him. He shattered that when he told me that it was "doubtful that Cialis causes any eye problems."
My retina had not detached; my eye had started bleeding. My eye had started bleeding less than 24 hours after taking a Cialis and not having pulled the pillbox while the pill was still in my system.
To me, this was another case of doctors ignoring other causes and concerns because those things just happen to diabetics. While diabetics do get extremely thirsty when their sugar levels rise, diabetics can get thirsty for reasons other than elevated sugar levels.
In what hindsight nags at me as possibly the biggest mistake of the situation, I sought out a new doctor with the hopes that the problem I was walking in with would actually be considered.