New glasses again?

I had just gotten new glasses some months before, when the teacher sent me home with a note saying that she thought I needed new glasses. After asking me about it, my mom decided to take me back to the optometrist. My vision tested almost 20/200. When my mom told the doctor how I just got new glasses, he decided to test me for glaucoma, even though I was only 9.

To our shock, my inner ocular pressure was in the mid-30's in both eyes. The doctor referred us to an ophthalmologist, and urged us to see her as soon as possible. We saw her the next day. She said that I need to see doctor specializing in juvenile glaucoma, and the closest one was at the Will's Eye Institute in Philadelphia, PA.

My case was very serious, and very urgent, they said. I needed to go on eye drops immediately. I found out that I despise taking eye drops. There weren't many options for eye drops, due to other health problems some of the drops would aggravate. The drops they finally decided on ended up giving me an asthma attack that lasted for hours. Up until this point, I either didn't have asthma, or it was so mild it never bothered me. Asthma would eventually become a much scarier part of my life, but at this point in my history, it was no big deal.

Since there were no eye drops that I could take, surgery was the only option. I had a trebectolectomy in both eyes.

This is when my miracle happened. A week after surgery, and after several 5FU injections into my eye, I was sitting in my eye doctor's office, waiting for her to look at my optic nerves again. 5FU is a cancer drug they used to inject into the patient's eyeball to prevent scar tissue from forming and blocking the artificial drains. When my doctor was looking at my nerves, she was yelling, "Oh my God! Oh my God!" in her Indian accent. My mother and I both asked, in panicky tones, "What's wrong?" The doctor explained that my optic nerved had regenerated. This is not supposed to happen. Once vision is gone from optic nerve damage, it's gone. End of story. Not the case for me though! I went from being almost legally blind to not having to wear glasses at all. This continued for over a year until the "bleb," or artificial drain in my left eye failed.

Three surgeries in the left eye later, I go to the doctor to investigate some strange eye pain. They couldn't decide what was causing the pain, but they did find that the pressure in my right eye was seriously elevated, to 32. Through a visual field exam, they were able to determine that I had quite a significant blind spot in the right eye. I had surgery scheduled for it as soon as possible. It then had to be put off because I found that I was unexpectedly pregnant. One and a half months, and some additional vision loss went by, and I had my second surgery on my right eye. What a rough recovery! It was going to be worth it though, because I was going to be able to keep vision in that eye.

Three months after my son was born, I found out that I was pregnant again. This time it was a girl! Then I started to have asthma problems, and ended up in the hospital, hoping the baby was getting enough oxygen. I had to go on steroids, but since my glaucoma was well controlled, it wouldn't be a problem. Wrong again. The inner ocular pressure was not controlled, and the steroids cause it to go higher, causing permanant, almost total vision loss in my right eye. Now my pressure in that eye is hovering at 38, and causing me to have horrible headaches.

So, now life is different. Part of me knows that the miracle this time will not be restoration of sight, but that there is another lesson to be learned here. Two things I am certain of: God will not ask me to do anything that He won't provide a way to accomplish, and that there is a divine reason I am faced with this. There are many things I can not know, like how much longer the pressure in my left eye will be stable enough to allow sight to remain, what the purpose of all of this is, how I'm going to continue to be a productive person, what life will be like.... the list goes on and on.

Right now, I'm just trying to learn how to deal with it. I'm trying to plan ahead, to the day I no longer am blessed with useable sight in my left eye. This blog's purpose is to give me a place to work through my feelings, and hope that maybe my life can help someone else deal with whatever it is they are going through. It helps to have a place to talk about the little day-to-day challenges that I unexpectedly face... Like how going down an unfamiliar flight of stairs! I totally almost fell down the stairs at Fairmont State today because I thought the steps were deeper than they actually were.