Back in veterinary school I had a classmate who worked in our Embryology professor's laboratory, taking care of his salamanders. It seems that, along with the ability to regenerate tails and legs, salamanders are capable of regenerating eyeballs. Believe me when I say that regenerating an eyeball is several magnitudes above the ability to regenerate a limb. In people, nerves don't regenerate. An eyeball is nothing more than a sphere of specialized nerves. If you currently are not a big fan of salamanders, keep in mind that understanding this little miracle could potentially lead the way to people who have lost their sight to illness or injury regaining partial or (dare I say it) perhaps even full vision. Fairly cool stuff.
Which, of course, segues nicely into this current catch up entry. Back in 10/2018 I was diagnosed with a "macular hole", which is a fancy way of saying that something unknown resulted in me having a small divot taken out of the center of the back of my eyeball. It was just a small spot, caused by agents unknown and really only affected my vision obviously at night (at that time). It was still worthy of regular visits to a retinologist to ensure that it didn't get worse and require treatment.
I went for regular 6-month check-ups with the retinologist, and the hole didn't advance in the least. During one of those visits, however, the doc spotted an "occlusion" of the central vein in the other eye, again due to agents unknown.
I mean, let's face it, Agent Unknown is some kind of capricious supervillain who is weirdly obsessed with making my life as miserable as possible. Complications from this little bug-a-boo could result in my losing some or all of my vision in my left eye though, so perhaps it was lucky that Agent Unknown decided to put a hole in my right retina, letting the doc find out what was going on in my left retina super early. Early diagnosis of retinal vein occlusion can be key to saving vision.
The treatment for this is to ... wait for it ... get medication injected into your eyeball on a far-too-regular schedule to prevent tissue damage to the retina. So beginning 10/2020 I was getting stuck somewhere that should never get poked on a 6-8 week schedule. And that has been continuing for nearly four years.
Since I'd been doing so well with the injections recently, my doctor decided to jump to an 11 week interval for injections. Today was my latest appointment with The Needle of Doom, and preliminary scans before the injection indicated that there was no sign of damage or inflammation since the last visit. My next visit isn't for 13 weeks, with the chance that if things still look good we may discontinue the injections and go back to regular visits to keep on eye on things.
I may have jumped the gun, but I did a little happy dance on the way out to my car after the appointment. And I don't care who saw.
By the way, the retinal hole in my right eye did finally advance last year and required eyeball surgery, but that's a story for another time.