Diagnosis: Glaucoma

It's taken me a week to process the shock of this news and to write this post. I went in to the eye doctor last week for a minor eyelid infection. Two hours and several tests later, I walked out with a diagnosis of glaucoma. And I am already partially, permanently blind in the left eye.

I worried about the cataracts I already have, and about diabetic retinopathy and macular degeneration. The good news is, I still don't have those and the cataracts are still small.

But I do have glaucoma, which was not even on my radar of things to worry about. The right eye compensated so well I was unaware of it.

The bad news is it is progressive and incurable. But there's good news too: The blind section is not yet in my field of straight-ahead vision, the right eye seems OK so far, and it can probably be slowed down with a simple eye drop. They say most people don't go totally blind if they stick to a care regimen.

It's funny. Now that I know about it, I keep closing my right eye, looking at things through the left and watching sections of them disappear into blank darkness. The blind section is about a fifth of my field of vision, directly above my line of sight. How could I not have noticed that? How could those puff tests every year at the optometrists have not picked up on the increased pressure?

Better yet, how can I get past this. Blindness is the one thing I don't think I could endure.


(Cross posted with Maraca.)