Yet another medical post

[fbhjr]

Today I took a long lunch break and went off to see my regular doctor.
(I had kind of forced an appointment when talking with her office manager yesterday.)

“What’s the problem?” she asked me.
I explained the vision problems I’ve been having.
“OK,” she said. “I’ll set you up to talk with some eye experts about this.”
“Did that,” I said. “I saw two in Worcester on Tuesday and one in Boston yesterday. Here are the notes from yesterday.”
I handed her the handwritten page from the doctor in Boston.

She read through them.
“You were right on top of this…” she said.
“Yeah. I’d really like to keep my sight.”
“It says he thinks the evening blood pressure medication might be making it worse. I’d want to see more results on your blood pressure.”
“Here’s all the readings I’ve taken for the last 6 months,” I said, holding out the data.
“I need to know time of day.”
“Right hand column.”
“Most of these are in the evening and are quite good! Some are even a bit low! He’s right, if your pressure is this low in the evening, don’t take the pill.”

She’s going to try and set me up with a round the clock blood pressure test. I guess several insurance companies don’t like paying for it. But, this should be enough to get it.
We’ll see.

So, everything the eye doctor asked for yesterday she agreed to.
No night time pill.
Aspirin once a day.
Eye drops twice a day.

I’ve been reading up on what I’ve got: NAION
The various things I’ve found about it on line are not optimistic.
Very few people get their sight back.

The good news is it doesn’t go to the other eye quite as often as I was led to expect yesterday. But, there’s still a good chance. (25% or so.)

If that happens it would probably destroy my way of life.
I’d be hard pressed to drive. Don’t see how I could sword fight.
And, I work by drawing shapes of things. Hard to do that when you can’t see them.

The lines in the National Institute of Health article that stand out to me are:
“NAION remains frustrating for clinicians and often devastating for patients.”
“It is uncertain whether any treatment will be effective”.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3721361/

The doctor I saw yesterday is in the acknowledgements of the article.
http://www.neec.com/Pages/Physicians/Hedges_Thomas.php

One of the strange things, is this doesn’t seem to impact my driving at all. The clear places in my vision are where I need to see things to drive: straight ahead, the mirrors and the controls. Who cares if I can’t see my legs, the car door or the ceiling of the car?

Who knows?
Hopefully it will get better.
I VERY much hope it won’t get worse or spread to the other eye!