Eye issues after aortic surgery

I had a complete emergent Aortic Dissection in 2015 with a dacron graft repair. Coma for two weeks. I have had ocular migraines since then about every other month. No pain, just a jagged rainbow that develops and takes 25-30 minutes to complete. Can't work or watch TV. I just wait them out. I have also had the swirly eye phenomenon, too. My right eye just started jumping all over and I could not get it to stop. It's happened several times. My brain scans showed a left parietal lobe stroke but it's unclear when that occured.

Suffice it to say, if you have survived an AD you've been through a lot of trauma in having your vasculature fixed. The docs aren't always going to have an answer for why certain things happen. Remember that it only in the past 25 years or so that people even survived an emergent dissection. I am convinced that the profound hypothermic circulatory arrest with the accompanying cerebral death that I underwent for my two surgeries left me a little different. It's okay. We're all here and we're all capable enough to ask good questions. Peace.

I am way later to the party as well, but I had an aortic root repair done in September 2024. I get halos and spots in my vision that correlates to migraines that was there previous to surgery and they seem to be more frequent. I do also get the uncontrollable eye movement for 30 to 60 seconds then it goes away and doesn't happen again for a month. It is disturbing and freaks you out and I am getting the same thing., "everything is fine from doctors. It is really hard to explain. I read the post about the stroke and apparantly that has not happened to me. Did anyone else gather any new info about this?

So I had an ascending aortic dissection in 2015 followed by emergency, open-heart surgery and a couple of weeks in a coma. The fact that you’re here is an absolute miracle. I have had spots, shutter vision, blindness, various visual hallucinations, as well as a jagged lightning bolt that moves across my vision slowly over about a 30 minute timeframe. I got a sneaking suspicion that the hypothermic complete circulatory arrest has something to do with all of it. If you were on DH CA, then I suspect you were in the same wonderland that I was in. It’s the kind of thing that almost nobody knows anything about even people in the medical community. Most of my information came from going back to California and sitting talking to my thoracic surgeon for an hour. Once I understood what he had done to me in saving my life, it was a lot easier for me to accept a little bit of the crazy auditory and visual situations. I did have my right eye start swirling around independent of my left eye uncontrollably. When I went to the emergency room, they told me I had had a left parietal lobe stroke. That makes total sense given all the crazy medical stuff that they did. So, don’t despair. You’re not the only one. The type of surgery you and I both had is absolutely as cutting edge as anything that’s possible medically. The fact that you’re having some after effects is normal. Feel free to reach out to me privately if you want to talk more. Peace.