Sue did her research on what AMD is, what causes it, and what she could do about it (pages 2 & 3). She found that there’s research being done (page 4). One of the studies she found had been conducted by Dr. Carl Regillo of Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia which is about a 2-hour drive for her. Three weeks later, she had her first appointment with Dr. Regillo (page 5 & 6). After her appointment, she did more research into what makes up a clinical trial (page 7).
You can open individual pages or start with page 2 and go from there to the next pages in order.
- 2. “The trouble comes when the Servants/RPEs are not doing their job anymore. One of the first signs of AMD is the presence of something called drusen. My reading very nicely indicated that these are fatty, metabolic byproducts of the photoreceptors’ job of turning light into sight. Basically, it seems to me that they are piles of poop. These piles of eye-poop suggest that the RPEs are not functioning as they should.”
- 3. “What my sweet, wonderful ophthalmologist did not tell me was how to cure what ails me. In fact, he told me there was no cure–well, ain’t that just dandy? ”
- 4. ” When somebody suddenly realized what the numbers were going to look like, they decided they had better do something to ameliorate the problem. Thus, all the research.”
- Research with links to current information.
- 5. “Carl Regillo is at Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia & has an office in Bethlehem, perhaps 2 hours away. And I got an appointment within 3 weeks of asking & they took my insurance. So far, it does not get any better than this.”
- 6. “Strange, staccato, conversation followed. I told him I wanted to read the article on the phase 1 results when it came out. It was out and he gave me the citation. I told him I had every intention of being in phase 2. The conversation was a bit of a tennis match. At times we are even finishing each other sentences. I felt as if we were definitely on the same page.”
- 7. “Let me go off on a tangent here for a moment. Until I got into this, I had no clue what happens in clinical trials. Short tutorial if I may: clinical trials are made up of four phases. The first phase is a safety and tolerability phase. Essentially, the researchers are looking to make sure that nothing serious goes wrong. They want to make sure that no one has an allergic reaction or grows stray body parts where they should not be growing.”
- Super Lab Rat with updated links to current 2018 research
Coming next
Sue went skiing and experienced what she thinks was snowblindness, talks about having panic attacks and visual hallucinations and goes back to the ophthalmologist. She starts teaching us about she’s using DBT to help deal with what she’s going through – and she revisits how DBT has helped her and others.