Wednesday, February 9, 2011

A visit to see the eye doctor

On Monday I went to see my old family ophthalmologist (a hard word to spell!), Dr Mark McGree. It was a check-up on my RPE defect which was diagnosed by Dr Kirkwood in Mackay. Dr Kirkwood told me to come back if things changed. Well, it's a bit difficult to go back to him now that we live in Brisbane, but I used to see Dr McGree before we went to Mackay, so I just went to see him instead.

The spot in my left eye's vision has grown a little. Hmm, let me draw a diagram instead of trying to find the right words:
In that spot, colours are wrong, especially if I blink quickly, and lines don't go through it straight. The shimmering I used to get when I looked at something really bright seems to have gone away. But the non-straight lines cause me some interesting issues, with spreadsheets and class rolls and other regular grids, but also with circular objects like protractors, mixing bowls and even circles I draw on the whiteboard. (They really don't look circular if the edge goes through that spot!)

I also seem to be getting a small odd spot in my right eye, just below my centre of focus.

Anyway, my eye doctors have traced it to a spot on my retina where I seem to have a drusen, a yellowish spot that seems to be between the RPE and the light-detecting cells in the retina. In Monday's OCT scan, you can see a small bump there: