CityView Magazine - Fayetteville, NC
Issue link: http://www.epageflip.net/i/40618
health Seeing is Believing Treating a rare disorder means relying on an eye-opening procedure | BY LENNY SALZBERG, M.D. Retinal Vein Occlusion is a relatively rare cause of vision loss. It is more common with increasing age, especially in those over 80. It is also more common in people with hypertension, diabetes, a hypercoagulable state, obesity, glaucoma, and in smokers. E ven doctors get squeamish when you talk about sticking nee- dles in eyes. Yet when Dr. Greg Mincey, retinal specialist, told me this was his recommendation I told him to go for it. My wife and I were driving to Captain Nance's Seafood Restaurant in Calabash last year and I was in the passenger seat navigating. Suddenly I couldn't see out of my left eye. It wasn't the whole eye, just the lateral side. My vision was gone — there weren't floaters or stars — just nothing. I closed my eyes and opened them again. I took off my glasses and cleaned them. The vision was still gone. After a few seconds 64 | September/October • 2011 I told my wife. She asked, "Do you think you're having a stroke? Do we need to go to the Emergency Department?" Denial is a powerful defense. "No, I'm sure I'll be okay," I told her. "I'm probably hypogly- cemic; it'll probably get better after I eat." Within a minute or so my vision returned. Then it happened two more times last fall. Since it came and went quickly each time, I didn't worry about it. In December, I started noticing that my vision was blur- ry. It was like a film of Vaseline over my left eye, but it came and went. Sometimes it was worse, sometimes better. In January I finally went to see my op- tometrist, Dr. Charles Balch. "You've got Central Retinal Vein Occlusion," he told me. He showed me the images of my reti- nas — first the good eye, then my left eye, the bad one. The good eye had straight blood vessels, a homogenous background, sharp margins — everything looked like normal eyes, like the ones I see every day when I use a fundoscope to look in pa- tient's eyes. The left eye? Not so much. There were dilated tortuous veins, macu- lar edema, hemorrhages all over the pos- terior pole and cotton-wool spots. It was obviously abnormal. So what caused this? What does it mean going forward? Will my vision return? Retinal Vein Occlusion is a relatively