chomiji | My Myopia Is More Speshul than Urz (Reply)

Finally, a health post that I don't have to lock down - even though it is something like #47 in the series of "How cho is not like other people."

In most people, myopia (near-sightedness or short-sightedness) is caused by lengthening of the front-to-back axis of the eyeball.

But it turns out that mine isn't. And this is actually something of a good thing.

The Story

I had my eyes checked back a couple of months ago because I had been getting headaches that seemed like eyestrain. And the Doctor of Optometry found that my left eye had jumped more than 2 steps worse - now it's about minus 11 diopters where it used to be about minus 8 (approximately the same as my right eye, and coincidentally, the strongest standard corrective snorkeling mask strength). So he wanted me to be checked out by proper ophthalmologists. The regular ophthalmologist, whom I saw last month, found nothing of interest.

Today I went to the retina specialists and things got interesting. The usual problem with extreme myopia is that you are at serious risk for retinal tears (as in "rip") and detached retina as your prescription gets worse. This is because, the doc informed me, you only have X amount of retinal tissue, ever, and as your eyeball gets less and less spherical and more and more elongated, that tissue gets stretched.

So I first had a thorough regular exam (like the one last month), and then they started putting drops in my eyes, first to dilate the pupil. Then they sent me to a little lab where I was injected (in the arm - that's all - you can breathe now!) with a yellow dye that would collect in my retinas, and I had my eyes held open while digital photos were taken of their insides. This allowed the doctor to make enlarged images of the back of the retina, where the optic nerve attaches. And that looked (he said) "really, really healhty."

So then he put more drops in my eyes, this time essentially anesthetizing their surface. And then he put a lens like a jeweler's loupe right up against my eyeballs so he could look in sideways at the portion of the retina near the front. At one point he poked my right eye with a blunt thing to make it squish a little. And I said ouch very loudly, because it did not feel good at all! (Turns out that the drops were one of the -caine anesthetics - I break those down much faster than most people.) And he said that that portion of my retinas looked very, very healthy too.

In fact, everything looks so healthy and wrong for someone with extreme myopia that he did another test free of charge. So now I can add my eyeballs to the list of parts that have had an ultrasound exam. And the shape of my eyeballs is completely normal!

So - my myopia is caused by corneal (lens) changes only. Oh, and he confirmed that I have very early signs of cataracts - in both eyes.

My pupils are still horribly dilated. I am sitting in a dim room with my monitor brightness turned way down.