Industry Figure Tom Chappell

I went to the retinal specialist today, after far too long an absence. It turns out that I hadn’t gone since October 2003, and really, I should go every 4-6 months. I scored 20/20 on my Evil Eye (the Y2K eye), and only scored 20/40 on my Excellent Eye (formerly known as the Blind Eye). But Yee Ha, 20/40 is all you need to drive, and even then only in one eye, if you have a doctor’s note, so I’m more than good to go: clear the road!

The doctor looked into my Evil Eye, reviewed the many operations from Y2K, and said, “I can’t believe that you’re getting 20/20 out of that eye!’ I really have been getting the sense lately that I’m just cheating eye death at this point, and that some day, long, long before I want it to happen, I’m going to lose a globe (functionally, at least; cosmetically, I’ll still be golden, and a hell of an attractive fellow).

The assistant hadn’t been able to measure the inter-ocular pressure (a measure of risk of glaucoma) because the doctor had been using the equipment on another patient, so after the doctor looked at my eyes, the assistant came back in and took some pressure readings, and they weren’t great: 26 and 30. 20 is considered exactly borderline: below is good; above is bad.

The doctor came back in, re-measured, and got 18 (ok) and 24 (bad!), and he also said that the retina in the Evil Eye looked a bit thickened, a bad sign, so he ordered photographs of the eye, along with an angiogram: they injected strong yellow dye into my blood (apparently I can expect to pee fluorescent yellow for several days) and snapped many bright, painful photos.

Painful! It’s interesting: my Excellent Eye has always been (well, since its repair from detachment in 1976, anyway) remarkably light-sensitive, while the Evil Y2K Eye is just the reverse: the photographer was shining strong lights into my eye, and muttering, “Damn, that’s dark.” Then he would bump up the light, and try again, but my eye would just close down on him — I don’t think that I was properly dilated, or it may have been the nick in my iris from Operation #1 causes the iris to stay a bit more closed than normal; I’ve always felt that the light in that eye was just a little dark — and perhaps that’s why I see better than expected out of that eye, since a smaller f-Stop has an inherently better focus.

While the doctor and photographer were looking at my eyes on the computer screen, the doctor remarked, “He gets 20/20 out of that eye. [Can you imagine?]”

The photographer looked at the picture and said, “Whoa. [No way!]”

The doctor said that the optic nerve in the Evil Eye doesn’t show any sign of glaucoma damage, and the blood vessels looked fine in the angiogram, so he’s just going to have me come back in 6 weeks to re-test the pressure. I suppose that if it’s bad a second time, that he’ll put me on glaucoma medication, or consider surgery, oog.

Nothing for now, though.