Walter had his quarterly eye exam on the 20th of August. His vision has not been what we hoped for lately. It's not scary bad like we saw last year, but it's not at the benchmark I always hope for - where he can see the big E on the eye chart. It seems Walter's vision has been slowly declining since the last good report in February.If they show you the eye chart and you cannot quite make out the big E at the top they measure your sight by how far away you can count someone's fingers when they hold up their hand. The assistant will hold up a certain number of fingers maybe 4 feet away and ask how many fingers she is holding up. I'm not sure what the outcome of that test was, but it was disheartening to watch the woman hold up 5 fingers and have Walter say he saw 3 fingers. They also gave him a device that has pinholes to hold over his eye because sometimes when you look through the pinholes you can see a little better. When he looked at the E with the pinholes he said it was little better. But I think he still would have hesitated to identify it as the E.
The good news is that the three things the doctor looks for were doing well:
- the cornea looked healthy and not inflamed
- the doctor could see the retina and it looked good; and
- his eye pressure was well under control thanks to the valve implant they gave him last year.
The decline in eyesight is discouraging, especially to Walter. He finds that he runs into walls a little more easily when going around a corner, and I see that when I hand him a glass of juice he has to study it more carefully before he can reach for it successfully. We have to be especially careful when going out at night or when he goes into a darkened restaurant from daylight. We just take it slow and so far we haven't had to curtail any activities except for hiking (which is just too scary given tree roots and other unexpected surprises).
Our hope is that Walter can hang onto his eyesight without further declines for as long as possible. We really appreciate all our supportive friends and family and those who have expressed their good wishes and prayers for Walter's sight.
In case you were wondering about the photo above, that's a picture of a rubber ball I picked up in the little store in my office building. We've had a lot of focus on eyes lately between Walter's recent checkup, my own annoying issues with dry eye and friends who are suffering from one eye ailment or another. When I first saw this ball I told the lady at the counter that the eye looked like my own eye felt! Then she told me to bounce it. So I did. When you bounce the "eye" ball the white of the eye lights up and flashes blue and red! I had to get it. Walter and I have been having fun playing with it.
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