Thursday, November 29, 2007

Eye-yi-yi!

It started when I flushed my contact lenses down the sink, but didn't realize it till the next morning when I went to put them in. Call it a brain fart, hormones or whatever, but this was a major problem. Not only was it going to be a couple of hundred bucks to replace them, but I didn't have a backup pair of glasses that would enable me to see until the new pair came in.

So I dug around in the bathroom drawer and found an old pair of contacts and popped them in so I could drive to the doctor. By the next day I got replacement lenses and had my eyes rechecked so I could get (duh!) backup glasses. But in doing so, the doctor discovered that my eye pressure had jumped up into the zone where glaucoma could be a concern.

Now, Dave has had glaucoma for some time and it's been kept under control with a simple regimen of eye drops, so I didn't immediately go to my worst-case-scenario default and sign up for a Braille class and buy a cane in order to prepare for the inevitable. But because my dad also had it in his later years, it was a concern that needed to be checked out.

Dave's doctor, one of the top glaucoma specialists in the state, tested me said there was nothing to worry about for the time being, but that he's putting me on his "watch list" and I'd need to be checked every year. This is all to say that if you haven't had your eye pressure checked for awhile, please do so, especially if there's any history of the disease in your family. Your optometrist or opthamologist can check your pressure pretty accurately, but if you have a concern, you should call a specialist. Selfishly speaking, I'd just hate to lose any of my readers!

2 comments:

Loo said...

Oy. Been there with the lost contact shenanigans!

I'm glad that it happened though so the doc could catch the eye pressure build up early!

Blind would be no fun and corgis are just too darned short to make a decent seeing-eye dog!

Kathleen Bauer said...

I know what you mean...low-hanging branches could be a real danger, since they'd never see them!