macular degeneration, macular, diagnosis In a Pig’s Eye – My Macular Degeneration Journey/Journal

In a Pig’s Eye

About three hours later and the ‘tapering’ snowstorm is not tapering. Anyone ever read ‘Ghost Story’ by Peter Straub? It scared my socks off on a summer day. On a day like today I would probably be quivering under the covers! [Lin/Linda: this was written in March of 2017.  In ‘real time’ it’s July 2017 when many of us in the US are having record high temperatures. Thinking of snow is ‘refreshing’!]

In ‘Ghost Story’ it starts to snow. They cannot keep the roads open and it snows. The electricity goes out and it snows. The phones go out and it snows. Eventually some smart soul figures out there is a malevolent force at work in this small, New York town. Yipes!

‘Ghost Story’ is on page 3 of the Gs in BARD. It is available as an audiobook on Amazon for $17.95. If you are still able to read print, you can get it used for about ⅕ of that price.

Another way to scare your socks off? ‘Turn of the Screw’ by Henry James. This one is a classic and free on Kindle. It is on page 15 of the Ts in BARD.

I will vouch for them both as excellent reads. Anyone else have any recommendations they would like to share? Just because we cannot see so well, doesn’t mean we cannot enjoy a good book. Since we like to think of our group as a cut above, try to avoid recommending trashy novels.  Although for a whole series of semi-trashy novels I would recommend the ‘….in Death’ series by J.D. Robb, also available on BARD.? [Lin/Linda: one of my favorites, too, but I don’t think I’d call it ‘trashy’ but definitely R-rated.   Click here for the list in order of publication date.  They’re available at amazon.com, too.  Click here for the first one ‘Naked In Death’.]

Anyway, that was NOT the way I was going to start this page. Not the topic either. I just looked outside and found it all a bit surreal. We are approaching an accumulation of two feet. Not much for some other places but impressive for Pennsylvania.

What I was going to do was tell you about “in a pig’s eye” and how the phrase now has a new meaning. For our international friends, “in a pig’s eye” is an old American expression that implies disbelief. It is the antiquated version of “No way!”

Now, they are finding a way to study drusen in a pig’s eye. Well, actually in a culture medium in which they have placed retinal ‘pig’-ment epithelium cells. (Alright, so it was corny, but I couldn’t resist.) They have found out that pig RPEs are similar in many ways to human RPEs. They have discovered the RPEs in early AMD are actually still functioning and the Bruch’s membrane may have more of a part in the process than previously believed.

This should just be the first of many good discoveries to come out of the pig’s eye experiments. Because they are now able to do a lot of manipulations of pig RPEs being grown in cultures, research can go faster. A lot faster than it would go trying to get people to have all these manipulations done on THEIR eyes.

So there is ever increasing hope here. When you tell people there is a bright future for AMD folks and they say “in a pig’s eye!”, your response can now be “Exactly!”

Keep on keeping on. There is hope.

Now could somebody stop this snow? Enough is enough already!

Next: coming soon!

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