Amare Stoudemire could miss 8 weeks

[Rockmeister]

Updated: February 20, 2009, 1:03 PM ET
Suns: Stoudemire could miss 8 weeks
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By Marc Stein
ESPN.com
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A day after deciding to let the trade deadline pass without making a major money-saving move, the inactivity seemingly has turned incredibly costly for the Phoenix Suns.

The beleaguered Suns announced Friday that Amare Stoudemire was forced to undergo eye surgery to repair a partially detached retina suffered in a Wednesday night rout of the Los Angeles Clippers. It is Stoudemire's second eye injury since October and the All-Star forward could miss the rest of the regular season.

Rest below

http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=3921500

 

[6th]

Whoa! I'll bet a lot of teams are sure happy they didn't work out a deal for Amare. Hey Phoenix, you made a mistake not coming to terms with someone for him. You snooze...you lose.

 

['89 Kings Fan]

Actually this is great news for us, since now Houston is almost a lock to make the playoffs. With no Amare and possibly no Jason Richardson, the Suns have almost no chance of making the playoffs.

 

[Bricklayer]

Two things:

1) another terrible blow to my fantasy teams, with Al Jefferson already gone and now Amare just getting set to quit pouting and go on a run; and

2) damn, we should have just traded for Amare, assuming we could have convinced him to go ahead and detach his retina for us as well. Could have gotten the star player, lost him, continued losing games left and right, and still had a chance at the #1 draft pick.


P.S. I agree this is potentially good news on the Houston front, assuming Ron or Yao do not go down with their annual broken/torn fingeranklelegarmribtoeeyesocketligementtendons.

 

[Oprostaj]

he got it in the first quarter they're saying. he put up 40 pts. detached retina. it's not even fun to say.

 

[Gary]

oooo I had one of those and it's not fun at all.. Took me a while to figure out I had it too. I thought I might be going blind lol. It was the weirdest "sight sensations" I have ever had.. It seemed like I would see flash bulbs from cameras go off out of the corner of my eye all the time, and those little floating string things that go across your vision are there and in numbers. Not just one but a ton of them. Also if I looked towards something long enough I wouldn't be able to see it anymore. The longer I stared without moving my eyeball I would not be able to see it anymore. It was too weird to describe.

 

[6th]

oooo I had one of those and it's not fun at all.. Took me a while to figure out I had it too. I thought I might be going blind lol. It was the weirdest "sight sensations" I have ever had.. It seemed like I would see flash bulbs from cameras go off out of the corner of my eye all the time, and those little floating string things that go across your vision are there and in numbers. Not just one but a ton of them. Also if I looked towards something long enough I wouldn't be able to see it anymore. The longer I stared without moving my eyeball I would not be able to see it anymore. It was too weird to describe.

Dang! Not something I would want to experience. Bad enough being legally blind without my corrective lenses.

Did you need surgery, Gary? How long was your recovery time?

 

[Capt. Factorial]

Also if I looked towards something long enough I wouldn't be able to see it anymore. The longer I stared without moving my eyeball I would not be able to see it anymore. It was too weird to describe.

That's really interesting. It turns out that this sort of image fading is either a "design flaw" or a "feature" of the visual system, whichever way you want to look at it. The eye constantly makes almost imperceptibly small movements called microsaccades (a few per second) which serve to jostle the image on the retina and counter this fading. Really clever mirror setups that track the eye and counteract its motion can induce this fading (to complete blindness) in a laboratory setting. Apparently, your detachment was severe enough that the inertia in your retina was enough to have your retina stay in place despite the microsaccades, and only a large eye movement was enough to shift the retina and "refresh" the image.

Cool stuff. I mean, not for you while it was actually happening, but...

 

[Entity]

I heard that it is a while before that heals and that your vision might not be the same as before.

 

[Nighthawk1]

Actually this is great news for us, since now Houston is almost a lock to make the playoffs. With no Amare and possibly no Jason Richardson, the Suns have almost no chance of making the playoffs.

This is pretty much the first thing I thought of when I heard the news. Hopefully he heals fine