Happy Saturday! Welcome to Presidents’ Day weekend! (In real-time, of course.)
I had a nice, long conversation with a representative of the International Macular and Retinal Foundation (IMRF) last evening. (Based in Maine. With a name like that you would think London, Paris, Zurich.) They came upon this website and liked it! (Flattery may not get you everywhere with me, but….OK, so I’m an attention junkie; OK??) Thank you IMRF.
The IMRF publishes self-monitoring tools under the name KeepSight. They sent me a cute, little booklet with basic AMD information, puzzles and different monitoring grids. They are free. IMRF is hoping to spread them around to not only us AMD types but also to doctors’ offices and other places people at risk may congregate. What they are trying to do is stop the progress of dry to wet before severe damage is done.
OK. Let’s stop here for a second. Don’t freak out. According to Bright Focus, only 15% or so of us with dry progress to wet. Lin just wrote a piece on the two types of advanced AMD. They are wet and GA, geographic atrophy. The second one is me; remember? I just got moved to appointments every six months because with my level of macula loss through GA, my chances of changing to wet are slim. Thank God. The more severe damage is done in wet.
Anyway, in the interest of full disclosure – in other words, I can’t lie to save my life so I stopped trying! – I admit I am not big on self-monitoring. My chances of progressing to wet are slim and I am, by nature, a bit of a rebel. However, that is not going to keep me from pulling the old “do as I say, not as I do!” trick on you.
Most of you have a fair amount of macula left and are in the earlier stages of the disease. Do you know you are not going to be part of the 15% that goes wet? I sure don’t. Which means you should self-monitor your vision.
Mayo Clinic gives the following symptoms for wet AMD and an eye bleed:
- Unusual distortions – that means the wiggles and things with the tops cut off and moved over
- Reduced central vision
- Decreased intensity and brightness of colors
- A well-defined blurry or blind spot in your visual field
- A general haziness of vision
- And the important one: Abrupt onset and rapid worsening of symptoms.
In geographic atrophy my macula has been slowly deteriorating. The two times I had a rapid decline in vision scared the daylights out of me and sent me off to the retinologist the same day. If you have a rapid decrease in vision, you should do the same.
The KeepSight booklet has some nice grids and examples of what a problem may look like. If you can’t get a hold of one of their booklets, at least print off a copy of the Amsler Grid and tack it on the fridge. Then use it! Remember, do as I say, not as I do!