Long appointment

Yesterday hubby came home from taking mom to 2 doctor appointments. One was with the foot doctor, who helped her with ingrown toe nail, the other was her regular eye doctor appointment. She came away from the eye doctor appointment with a referral to see a retina specialist due to some bleeding behind one of her eyes.  I thought that she needed to have the blood removed with a needle as that was mentioned as well.  I wasn't with her and hubby was in the waiting area the whole time so it was totally unclear. 

But she didn't want to get any needle in her eye and also wasn't fond of going down to a place at least 20 minutes south of us.  Anyway I tried to find out a little more information this morning from her eye doctor as to the reason for this,etc., and ended up convincing her to go ahead and keep the appointment at 2:00PM.  When I got there, there were already 8 or so people waiting.  Turns out they did NOT have the appointment in their records. I asked the gal (softly) to please fit mom in because wasn't sure I could get her to go again.  So 2 1/2 hours later she was finally seeing the doctor (after tests, dilation, more eye tests).

I found out that she has now wet macular degeneration and possible glaucoma.  She has had dry macular degenerated for a while but now she also as the wet form in her right eye which translates to some blood seeping behind her eye. So the wet is blood seepage, which I didn't know until today. The wet kind is much worse and can speed up the degeneration process. And a needle is not used to draw the blood out (which I wondered how the heck that would work), but rather a needle with medication is injected in to the eye to help slow down the macular degeneration and possibly improve the eye sight.  She really didn't like the thought of a needle in her eye. Who would??  But she needed to make a decision and finally agreed to the shot. It was a small needle which was nice.  I kept imagining a long needle!! LOL.

She got through it and doesn't have to go back for 6 weeks. At that time they will check and she may or may not need another shot at that time.  She will need shots periodically to keep this at bay, otherwise the sight in that eye will go dark starting from an inner circle which gets bigger and bigger.  He said she is legally blind in that right eye currently so even though she doesn't see a black hole in the center her vision is not there in that eye. 

So luckily I am allowed to take the time away as sick time off (since it is for family) so I took 3 hrs sick time and worked a little longer this evening to get my work done. It worked out fine, but it was a really long day for my mom for sure.  She was exhausted by the time we got back to her home.

I think she is done with doctor appointments for a month now so that is good news! :)