I was very pleased to finally hear from Irakly yesterday. He answered an email I sent a couple of weeks ago.
He says hi, and that he's doing ok, though still struggling with his terrible mishap:
I'll be back, I promise
Interestingly enough, he says photography is one of the few thing he is extremely confortable doing right now. Cool, huh?
Oh, and he says he's discovered that an eye patch is definitely a "babe magnet"...