Chemo #17… last round!
First to catch up. Kris went virtually blind in her right eye some weeks ago. It started while she was out on her daily walk on a Friday and the ‘blindness’ is much like a film of oil on her eye. We initially thought that it was due to sun block getting into her eye or into her contact lens. She changed out lenses and things seemed to get better. The following Tuesday it returned. The next Friday we went to see an optometrist and he suggested rinsing with eye drops. He found no evidence of macular degeneration, corneal detachment or anything that we were most worried about. That following Saturday (a week on now), it got markedly worse. She rinsed her eye with a hand held spigot we have on one of our tubs for about 15 minutes and that seemed to help but not by much. The following Monday we saw the optometrist again and he referred us to an ophthalmologist. The eye Dr. found a small tear in the macula with an associated fluid pocket. They said that this could be from high blood pressure (and this fits from due to the spike she had when suffering one of her migraines) or she might’ve had a cold which affected this region of the eye. Long and short is we have this damage but don’t know the real cause. They asked her to wait two weeks at which time they would inject dye and get a better picture of what is going on.
Meanwhile, Chemo #16 was scheduled in this time frame. Dr. Moran said that a rare side effect of Avastin is damage to the eyes and could lead to blindness. We will suspend treatment until we know more. After the answer from the Ophthalmologist, we rescheduled for the following Thursday and had infusion #16 (uneventful) based on their diagnosis of the problem. In short, they decided that Avastin wasn’t directly the problem and it was safe to continue with it. Point of fact, the eye Dr. said that they might well use Avastin for this problem with the eye!
When we went back for the test of Kris eye which included the dye, the Dr. found no sign of leakage which indicates that this is likely not related to blood pressure (so much for my theory). He concluded that it must be a hereditary thing and prescribed a drug he has had success treating this problem with. As a coincidence, Kris father Gerry was visiting and he too had a similar event back in the ‘80s which caused him to retrain which was his dominant eye. For the record, Kris is doing fine and sees well enough to function though not as well as she did before this event.
Chemo #17.
We saw Dr. Moran and conferred with him over the drug that the Ophthalmologist had prescribed. Dr. Moran knew of no reason not to take that drug along with the Avastin… especially since this was the final installment of Avastin. He did order a Pet Scan to occur between now and September so that he can review that scan the first week of September. We are back on the post chemo/treatment treadmill of scanning and watching to make sure that Kris is clear of cancer.
“Do not come in early! Do not stay late! There will be overtime!” Anon… for now.
