Those of you who have waited a whole month with me to hear what’s going on with my eyes can breathe a bit easier now. I’m breathing easier, though walking’s another story.
My vision has edged back toward where it used to be. And that’s because the back of my right eye has edged back toward where it used to be.
My ophthalmologist today told me:
I can read two lines better on the eye chart than a month ago.
The puddle of leaky fluid in my retina has shrunk, some, since a month ago. On my scans, the puddle looks like the triangular dark blue area in the photo. Bigger triangle = bigger puddle.
I’m not back to my “normal” vision. (I’ll never be back to teenage, ripped, normal vision.) The puddle is smaller but still there. My “good” right eye still has to be able to read a few lines of even smaller type.
So we’re going to wait another month. I’ll come back and we’ll do the eye charts again. The scans again. We’ll see if the fluid has continued to recede. If it has, we’ll keep cheering it on. If it hasn’t, my doctor took the pictures today that he needs to know exactly where to shoot the “cold” laser to seal the leaks. I can jump straight into the chair and tell him, “Fire when ready.”
We’re essentially in the same situation as we were in my “Devastated” post last month. But our position has improved some.
Can I recover my sight in my one “good” eye? I won’t know for a while. First, we wait a month to see if any of the fluid resorbs on its own. If it doesn’t, we plan the PDT laser shots. Then we wait again to see if it works and how well it works. The literature says PDT restores visual acuity in 60 to 90 percent of the cases. It also says each recurrence of the disease increases the odds that it won’t respond to the treatment. I’m rolling the dice with fewer ways to hit 7 or 11 each time.
I’m still scared shitless of going blind. (Or as Andrew Leland says in his excellent new book, Country of the Blind, “becoming blind.”) But now I feel I’m on the probably-won’t-happen side of the fence.
I’ll take that victory.
P.S. I’ll write more about Leland’s book, subtitled A Memoir at the End of Sight, in a coming post. It tracks the psychological effects of the author’s slow loss of vision and explores the blind advocacy, blind civil rights, and blind culture. Well-written and well-researched. I recommend the audiobook version. It’s narrated by the author, who is Neil Simon’s grandson and has some of grandpa’s quirky sense of humor.
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