No dilating drops!

Today was back to the eye doctor, for a visual field test and photos of my optical nerves. The visual field test was sort of the equivalent of a hearing test where you put your hand up to show you heard the ping. You do one eye at a time, with a plastic patch covering the other one. You stare into a yellow light at the back of a space-age-looking bowl. There are flashes in your peripheral vision, some so faint as to make you think you imagined them, and you press a button each time you see one. Repeat on other side.

This happens in a darkened room, and the good news was that my eyes were dilated enough just from this process that I didn't need drops for the photo.

I now know what the insides of my eyes look like. They are orange-pink, veined, with a darker spot in each. They have a fetal look about them, actually. They don't look much like anything capable of perception.

What a strange thing a body is.

Anyone else have encounters with their insides they want to share?

Eye update/My life as a suspect begins

No surgery!

Which means the pressure is normal, for now, and the asymmetry in my optic nerves is not pronounced enough to cause the doctor concern. My little paranoia about how I was feeling more pressure in the right eye* is just sinus stuff.

I'm sorry I couldn't let everyone know yesterday, but my pupils looked like dinner plates for at least 4 hours after the doctor put the extra dose of dilating drops in so she could see what she needed to see even though I was jumping around like a certain two-year-old of my acquaintance bloodline. It made driving home a challenge and looking at the computer screen impossible.

But I am now an officially-diagnosed "glaucoma suspect," a phrase that makes me feel like my phone is going to be wiretapped. I'm going to need regular monitoring more or less indefinitely. I start by going back on Tuesday for baseline visual-field testing and a photograph of my ever-so-slightly, not-a-big-deal, we-won't-worry-(yet) lopsided nerves. After that, it will be every six months until she has a sense of how quickly it's progressing.

Just in case all this good news is misleading: it is progressing: there is pigment in the drain of the eye. If the drain clogs, the pressure in the eye will rise. But I'm not there yet. And all the monitoring is so I won't get there.

*There is slightly more pressure in the right eye--but apparently you just can't feel intra-ocular pressure.

Gratitude

Shavua tov, for those who pay attention to these things--it's a new week.

As we were driving to the pool yesterday, I was talking with A. about what an intense week the last one was for me: the Harry Potter launch party, the diagnosis, an unbloggable piece that was at a hard place earlier in the week but was at a good place on Friday. I also got word on Friday that a news show wants to film the store on Monday in connection with a magazine article that's coming out this week--which makes me think we may get good news in the magazine.

It was hard to believe it was all in the same week.

The eye diagnosis was bad news that came out of nowhere, and I am grateful to all of you for all your responses. I'm especially grateful to Phantom, who is a good friend and an email wizard, for helping me just be sad about it for an evening and then start putting it in perspective. And to E. and Jenny and Niobe and Mom and everyone else who helped me focus on how good it was that this was caught early and my vision is still fine and how many treatment options there seem to be--also, thank you. Sometimes when you get bad news you just don't want to have a good head on your shoulders, you know? Or sometimes I don't want to, anyway. Sometimes I want someone else to do that part for me so I can indulge in dire thinking--to take myself out to the edge and look over before I find my way back to the path of coping and management. So, thank you all. And I'll let you know how it goes with the ophthalmologist (including whether I manage to get in early!)

And may it be a sweet and easy week for everyone.

p.s. Lo, thank you for making me laugh about A.'s hipsterism!

Doctor, my eyes ...

I realize that was a wee bit terse last night; that was pretty much all I could do.

The story is that the Rhyming Family went to the optometrist yesterday, armed with the appropriate vision-benefit forms, specially issued by the teachers' union benefit office.

The last time I had new glasses was four years ago, and since those were knocked onto the floor in a toddler-influenced incident in May, the left lens has a deep scratch in the middle of it, such that when I wear them there is a blurry patch in the middle of my vision on that side. I have been joking that it's like practicing for glaucoma. Ha. Ha. I've taken to using my old glasses instead--the prescription didn't change last time--but four years ago they were beat up enough that I wanted to replace them, so you can imagine how they're doing now. I'm constantly cleaning them only to find it makes little difference. It was time.

For her part, A. needed new glasses because Z. pulled off the earpiece of hers a few months back, and the paper-clip thing only lasts but so long. Plus her prescription sunglasses were destroyed in the accident. Airbag, you know.

A. went first while Z. and I took a little trip next door to Wawa for a whole wheat hoagie, but by the time we got back it was already my turn, so I assigned Z. to consult with A. on frames.

Somehow, it seemed like my exam was taking longer than A.'s. There was a lot of shining lights into my pupils. There was a lot of optometric tools coming up closer to the surface of my eye than was comfortable. Finally he wrote the words "Krukenberg's spindle" on the back of an ophthalmologist's card and told me about the pigment on my cornea, the different sizes of my optic nerves, the possibility of glaucoma.

Then I went out into the frame-choosing part of the office. A. was still choosing frames. I ate my hoagie and I urged A. to take frames just a little more hip than her old ones. I put the things back that Z. took off the shelf. I chose a pair of frames that I had urged A. to reject, in easily the most distracted frame-choosing move of my glasses-wearing life.

I came home, hit google, and fell apart. And Z. chose yesterday to have her first attack of the "why's:" "Why is mama crying?" "Why is she scared?" "Why is there something wrong with her eyes?" She kept climbing into my lap and I couldn't tolerate her there.

What is apparently happening to me is that the pigment is coming off of my irises and floating around the inside of my eyes. In my right eye, which is my worse eye, some of it is collecting at the bottom of my iris. I can see this in the mirror; the only reason I never saw it before is that I didn't know to look. Creepy as all of that sounds, it is apparently not a problem. The problem is that the pigment can block drainage channels in the eye so that pressure increases. And then you can wind up with glaucoma. It is genetic and permanent and degenerative, but it can be managed. So this doesn't mean I'm going to go blind. Most likely. But I don't know how far it's progressed, either. It's been a long time since I saw an optometrist I trusted. At any rate, I called for an appointment with the ophthalmologist this morning; because I'm a new patient they couldn't see me for two weeks, so now I have two weeks to cycle through deliberately forgetting/brooding/obsessive internet searches.

We went directly from breakdown to an outdoor concert with a college friend who's visiting town with her husband and ten-month-old (a different college friend from last week--I do seem to be having a summer full of college friends, which has been lovely). It's the kind of relationship where we keep each other in the loop on marriage invitations and birth announcements, but not the kind of relationship where I could blurt all of this out when I hadn't seen her in two years. Instead, I think I was completely and thoroughly distracted.

Not least by the simple act of seeing. The concert was at the Morris Arboretum, a lush and gorgeous place. My eyesight corrects to better than 20/20--I've always regarded it as a gift and a tool, something I could rely on. I barely took in the concert--it couldn't touch Pink Martini, that's for sure. Instead, I looked out at the crisp, distant leaves on the trees at the far side of the park, and up at the oceans of the moon as it rose, and checked to see if there were any patches I was missing. Not so far. Not so far.

* * * * *

This morning:

Z. clambers into our bed and over Mommy.

Z.: Is it wake-up time?

S.: Hi boo, you are my favorite, favorite boo.

Z.: And you are my mama! And you love me even when you're crying.

S.: That's right.

Z.: And you don't have anything in your eye anymore.

S.: Oh, sweetie.

Z.: And you're not sad.

Everyone's getting bad news at the doctor today

Krukenberg's spindle: discuss.