Saturday, February 03, 2007

Only a Teardrop

Ladies and gentlemen, meet my eye:


At long last you get to see my actual left eye. I figured it was about time you got a good look at the real deal. This is the standard sheet of photos that Dr. Eye Guy looks at to determine when I next need a shot of Avastin and how well those pesky weedy blood vessels are holding up. I get a bunch of blinding photos snapped at point blank range before and after the isocyanine dye is injected, and what you see above is sort of a time lapse line of my eye during the process.

The blind spot I've circled? That's the first thing I notice when I wake up in the morning, and the last thing I "see" at night, the large, jagged circle of nothing that is burned, quite literally, into my vision.

Here's a close-up:


The teardrop in the center? That's the clump of nasty blood vessels. Bastards. When you compare the size of the blind spot to the overall size of my center of vision, you can see why my sight has become so impaired and why there is so much distortion in what I see. This teardrop in a circle is why everyone looks like a stroke victim to me. And why, when I have a sinus infection now, it feels like I have an icepick embedded in my skull. And why I sometimes cannot get my eyes to focus on the same spot at the same time some days... I'm not quite a chameleon with eyes whirring in separate directions, but it feels close some days.

Just a teardrop. So tiny in reality. So huge to me.

I hope injections I'm going through - and the financial distress I'm experiencing as a result - will eventually mean that millions of people will keep their vision. That this drug will be FDA-approved. And people won't have to make a choice between functioning eyes and financial stability.

Only a teardrop. But to me, it's like an ocean.

3 comments:

E :) said...

Wow. That's an incredible post.

Janet Kincaid said...

Wow. It's always the little things, isn't it. I also hope everything you're going through with your eye and everything else proves beneficial for others.

Unknown said...

WOW... I have something similar in my right eye... "they" don't know how it got there - but it is a 'blood clot' form what they can tell. It's been there for years.. and I mean years! It started out with everything being really distorted - like fun house mirrors in my head, then just went black.