Eye Doctor Visit

It has been almost one year since I last posted anything.  This is mostly because my life is now one of a person who is bed bound.  So one day is almost identically like the previous.  In fact most of my doctor appointments have been almost identical.  So rather then bore you with posting after posting that basically say the same thing I have decided to not post until I have what I consider major news about how my disease is progressing.  My eye sight has gotten so bad, that I often have to increase the font on my computer in order to read what is printed.  Sometimes I have to use a magnifying glass to read what is on the computer.  I now see double with one image above the original image.

Yesterday July 11 I had an appointment with my Neuro-Ophthalmologist.  Here is what my wife P. wrote to our family and to my siblings.

Let's see if I can summarize what happened.  The girl who does the initial exam kept trying to get results that may sense to her and finally we had to put him in the normal exam chair so she could use the usual machines which still gave her similar results.  Basically, it said that his prescription had hardly changed but he was seeing at 20/80 in spite of seeing 20/30 with the same prescription in January.  Also he was having double vision even when seeing with only one eye.

When Dr. M. came in he said that normally you should only have double vision with 2 eyes and that the prism should have fixed that so that since he now has double vision whether he is using one eye or two he needs to look for a different cause.  He has small cataracts and has had them for some time.  He thought perhaps they had grown but they had not so that was not the answer to why he is experiencing such difficulty seeing.  He has a severe astigmatism which makes correcting his vision difficult.  He doesn't want to do cataract surgery yet because of his health and he isn't sure it would solve the problem.  The cheaper way would be to change his prescription in one of his pairs of glasses and see if that corrected things before we proceeded to change all three sets of glasses.  We discussed that fact that we had to change neurologists and pulmonologists and I asked if the increase in his Lyrica RX could play any part in these changes.

It seems Lyrica can cause blurred vision and since his Rx was increased greatly in late March (from 375 mg. to 700 mg. a day and then lowered to 600 mg. in late June, it is possible that is what is causing the vision issues.  In the end, since we are changing neurologists, he suggested that we don't do anything until either 1. He adjusts to the change of Rx strength or 2. The new neurologist perhaps changes prescription regimen.  We go back to see him in October.

So nothing has changed and we continue to wait.  I like that he is conservative in his approach. He tries not to have us spend money needlessly (like paying for glasses that probably won't solve the problem.)  He did say that he would consider the cataract surgery but would prefer to wait until they were worse.  However, if he thought that it might solve the issues Phil is having, he would do it.  "I'm up for the challenge" were his words.

P.