Am I Going Blind? -
- 6 years ago
Am I Going Blind? -
I found one, Golnaz Moazami, who could squeeze me in a few days later,
and after three tedious hours of staring at or into charts and colored patterns and sophisticated machines, she told me this, in a rat-tat-tat fashion:
I had almost certainly experienced what is colloquially called “a stroke of the eye,” whereby
the optic nerve is ravaged by a brief reduction of blood flow and thus oxygen.
But there is really very little that we can do to restore vision that’s damaged from optic nerve disease.”
Rudrani Banik, one of the neuro-ophthalmologists who monitor me during the clinical trial, told me to think of the nerve
and its surrounding sheath as “a cable within a pipe.” My pipe, she explained, is a quarter of the normal size, so if the nerve swells — as nerves do when bereft of oxygen — it’s more likely to press up against the pipe and be hurt.
“If this hits my left eye,” I said to my friend, “it’s game over.”
“Why?” he asked, then told me that Judge Tatel was blind.
It would edit my right eye out of the equation so that my left eye could guide me on its own, leaving me with entirely serviceable vision.
I don’t mean all the tests and procedures: the vials upon vials of blood; the mapping of major arteries in my neck; the imaging of tiny vessels in my brain; the first injection
of an experimental treatment (or, maybe, a placebo) into my right, dominant eye, where the damage occurred; then the second injection; and then, last week, the third.
I called Tom, my partner of more than nine years: “Would you still love me with a cane
and a bad habit of bumping into things?” I called three of my best friends: “I’m fat, I’m old and now I’m a Cyclops.
I found one, Golnaz Moazami, who could squeeze me in a few days later,
and after three tedious hours of staring at or into charts and colored patterns and sophisticated machines, she told me this, in a rat-tat-tat fashion:
I had almost certainly experienced what is colloquially called “a stroke of the eye,” whereby
the optic nerve is ravaged by a brief reduction of blood flow and thus oxygen.
But there is really very little that we can do to restore vision that’s damaged from optic nerve disease.”
Rudrani Banik, one of the neuro-ophthalmologists who monitor me during the clinical trial, told me to think of the nerve
and its surrounding sheath as “a cable within a pipe.” My pipe, she explained, is a quarter of the normal size, so if the nerve swells — as nerves do when bereft of oxygen — it’s more likely to press up against the pipe and be hurt.
“If this hits my left eye,” I said to my friend, “it’s game over.”
“Why?” he asked, then told me that Judge Tatel was blind.
It would edit my right eye out of the equation so that my left eye could guide me on its own, leaving me with entirely serviceable vision.
I don’t mean all the tests and procedures: the vials upon vials of blood; the mapping of major arteries in my neck; the imaging of tiny vessels in my brain; the first injection
of an experimental treatment (or, maybe, a placebo) into my right, dominant eye, where the damage occurred; then the second injection; and then, last week, the third.
I called Tom, my partner of more than nine years: “Would you still love me with a cane
and a bad habit of bumping into things?” I called three of my best friends: “I’m fat, I’m old and now I’m a Cyclops.