Back again in the same day. You do know I am ridiculously hard to get rid of; don’t you??
This is the page I was going to write before my ZoomText, inelegantly put, took a dump. Now I will write it.
I went to see my local retinologist Monday. Great guy. He is good. His kids are good. I feel I see him enough I get to inquire about the boys.
I also feel like I am becoming ‘friends’ with my tomography tech. We chat. I asked about the enhanced depth tomography. He had the capability with his machine and since it would not cost any extra, he ran it on me. The pictures were pretty. I saw my optic nerve and my ‘divot’, geographic atrophy, but did not have the training to see much else.
The tomography tech pointed out two veins in my choroid. They were old veins, not new ones. It is sort of bizarre to realize how relatively deep the hole is in my macula, but that is a part of the definition of geographic atrophy; the damage is choroid deep.
Neither my local retinologist nor I believe I will convert to wet AMD. He has put me back to twice yearly for my check-ups. It was my understanding, and my retinologist confirmed, that wet developed as an adaptation (sort of) to the dry form of AMD.
The way I understand it, when the RPEs and the photoreceptors are not getting enough oxygen and nutrients they send out the SOS . They need supplies! They are starving! The body responds by establishing new supply lines in the form of new blood vessels. The only problem is these vessels are inferior. They break and the bleed. Problem not solved. The fix does not work so well.
I got the impression I am back to twice yearly visits – and he does not think I am a candidate for wet AMD – because I don’t have a lot of macula left. Now he did not say that. It was an impression but I am usually pretty good at those. I don’t think there is much for my body to try to save anymore.
Good thought and bad thought. Or actually bad thought and good thought. Bad thought that I may have reached this level so quickly. Good thought: could the slide be over? Will I soon stop losing vision?
Now, cheating my sweet little patootie off and using eccentric viewing and guess work to the max, my vision tests as 20/50. Am I really 20/50? No, but I cheat well. And they know I cheat, by the way. I tell them every time.
If I can cheat and test at 20/50, that means I have decent functional vision. I can do a lot with that. Not so bad.
So why all the horror pictures of visual fields that are 90% bleach white with decent vision around the edge? If this is a ‘central vision loss’ problem, what is the definition of central vision?
No clue, but Lin and I are on the hunt. Let ya know.
Next: Avoidable Blindness
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