Eye Yi Yi

It's now twenty hours after the heavy-duty eye dilation drops and I'm still halfway open and seeing rainbows and blurs. Compounded by the exceedingly bright flashes that accompanied the various exams and turned white to pink. (Well, the pink has faded, at least. Since they used the mondo drops–but not the Mucho-mondo atropine–I might have a day or more before things go back to normal, such that that is. 

Blue eyes take longer, for reasons having to do with pigment and uptake and like that.

The Mucho-mondo drops, usually used in babies and small children for complicated things, might leave 'em dilated for a couple weeks. Whoa.)

This was the follow-up exam with the specialists I spoke of a few posts back. 

I trucked from room to room, this test, that one, including the infamous glow-in-the-toilet fluorescent die injected into a vein while a cameraman snapped images of ye olde eyeball ...

Thought I was kidding?

Three hours in the clinic and it's all in their computer. The diagnosis?

AMD. Well, probably. Age-related macular degeneration. Maybe secondary to that event in the mid-eighties, the cause of which was and still is unknown. Or maybe not. Maybe God knows, but the doctors don't.

Wet or dry? Probably 95% chance it is dry, but we'll recheck in a month to see if there's a slow leak. Why? Because if it's wet, i.e., vessels leaking serous fluid and whatnot into the macula, that is worse–and better. Worse, because it goes downhill fast. Better, because it can be treated with lasers and injections and maybe stopped. Maybe.

Dry rot? Too bad. Eat a lot of leafy green veggies, don't smoke, and hope it doesn't get worse, or that it takes its sweet time doing it. Which it might. And those floaters? Get used to all those gnats flying about when you look up into the blue sky. Get more of those as you age, too. 

The best news? The other eye is fine, no signs of this, so it should be good for a while. At least until it eventually clouds over and I have to get the cataracted lens out. Which, if you live long enough, happens to virtually everybody, cataracts.

Gravity always wins in the end.

Moving on ...