Living Jackson Magazine : Go Blind or Go Insane

Go Blind or Go Insane

By Caine Campbell

My father, who was a physician, asked me in the 1940s, when I was a teenager, if I could name the most important miracle drug. By that time, drugs that had been developed included aspirin, sulfa and penicillin. I named penicillin.

Doc told me that I was probably right, strictly speaking, but that the greatest miracle “drug” would be money! If it could be provided, he told me, his patients could get much more of the care they needed. He could treat them, and frequently did, as charity patients, but they could not afford the diagnostic procedures that had become available and often could not afford the needed drugs.

A lot has changed since then, including much broader coverage by health insurance, but the essential truth of what he told me has not changed. There is, however, another barrier besides lack of money. It is one that is completely within your own power to overcome. You are going to be surprised at this revelation. If I were writing to you in an e-mail, at this point I would say, “Scroll down.”

The healthcare barrier is your ego. As you grow up free of dread diseases, you develop pride in your good health. You develop pride in your abilities, whether in academics or athletics. Along with pride comes the sin of a feeling of superiority to other people. You come to believe that when you hear about cancer, heart disease and glaucoma, for example, these maladies only strike inferior people. Of course this phenomenon is contrary to logic, but such is the human condition.

For a number of years, when I went in for eye exams and was asked if I wanted the simple test for glaucoma, I thought I was simply humoring the doctor when I agreed. I would never get glaucoma. That only happened to OTHER people.

Glaucoma is a disease characterized by an increase in pressure within the eyeball. It does its damage by pressing on the optic nerve directly behind the eyeball. Untreated, the result will likely be blindness.

I am not going to tell you the age at which you should get the simple test for glaucoma, because I am not a physician and I am not practicing medicine by writing this account. You can ask your own eye doctor. I’ll just say glaucoma can occur at an age younger than you might think. Get the test. GET THE TEST NOW.

Contrary to my feeling of superiority, I was eventually diagnosed with glaucoma. For several years I was treated with daily instillation of eye drops. The patient does the instilling, perhaps three times a day. In some patients, a time arrives when a glaucoma pressure that was suitably low is no longer low enough. When that point arrived in my case, the ophthalmologist prescribed a stronger eye drop to get the pressure still lower.

You may be surprised to learn that the tiny amount of eye drop gets absorbed into your blood system, where it can cause undesirable side effects. The warning packaged with the tiny container of eye drops included the possibility of somnolence and psychic disturbances. After several weeks of instilling the drops, I began experiencing the latter. To be brief in my description of symptoms, I’ll just say I felt a little bit like I was going crazy. That’s an overstatement; I was still in conscious control of my faculties.

I told the prescribing ophthalmologist what I had begun experiencing. His response was not callous, although it will sound so. He and I had gotten to know each other and he knew that a touch of humor would be OK. He said that I faced a choice: Go blind or go insane. His point was that the pressure had to come down in order to save my sight, and to bring the pressure down I had to continue the eye drops that were causing psychic disturbances.

Fortunately there was an alternative. Eye surgery was scheduled on the last day of January. It turned out that cataract surgery was needed as well. Both surgeries, on my left eye only, would be performed during one hospital visit. Two to three months later, assuming that all went well, surgery would be performed on my right eye.

To find an area eye doctor, see the listing in this issue or look them up in the Yellow Pages. An ophthalmologist is a doctor of medicine, that is, a physician who has earned an M.D., specializing in the functions and diseases of the eye. An optometrist is a specialist in measuring errors in refraction and prescribing corrective lenses. In current practice, the optometrist as well as the physician is prepared to administer tests for glaucoma. Often you will find both kinds of practitioners in the same practice.

Did I say GET THE TEST NOW? Of course I did. I remember saying that. What I want to add is, get the test not only for glaucoma, but the tests for other conditions that you may have been neglecting.

Males need to get the prostate specific antigen (P.S.A.) test. Females need to go in for breast exams and pap smears. All of us need to be tested for cholesterol levels, blood pressure and heart health. Consult your own physician for advice on testing you should receive so that your healthcare is proactive, not reactive.

You need to know that the writer of this piece is male, so you’ll understand that I know what I’m talking about when I tell you that females are much better about these things than males. When the female goes, make the man go, too. He is primarily the one who is so egotistical that he thinks dread diseases are contracted only by other people. Keep his ego healthy by seeking early diagnosis and hopefully reducing the severity of any onslaught of disease or sickness.