It looks as if I am the third person to have Valley Fever present in an eye. I understand that one of the others had an eye removed before he died and the other went blind before he died. By April 3rd, after two weeks of pain in the right eye, everything went brown.
On April 9 the local ocular oncologist showed pictures of lesion--looked like an alligator's stomach. An April 15 the greatest ocular oncologist on the West Coast (up north) looked at a 31 January 2020 photograph I had luckily taken (to avoid dilation) and said, Not melanoma because melanoma is slow. No, he said, this has spread from an aggressive cancer elsewhere in your body. We had made holograph wills before driving north to see him, and we made more formal ones after we returned. We were so brave and rational that I never want to be tested again for fear this was not repeatable.
On April 27 we were told that I had Valley Fever and I was put on Fluconazole. The thinking was that maybe there was no cancer except in the eye. The next day, optimist that I am, I was hoping that the anti-fungal pills would reduce the lesion in the eye. Ocular people said that was not possible. April 30, the ocular oncologists still thought the eye is cancerous. I was the only one who thought that the Fluconazole is already helping the eye. April 30, lung biopsy. Good eye patches finally arrived from the Amazon supplier, but too late: the vision from the right eye is still brown but I can see through it and read on the computer, with glasses, seeing with both eyes. May 1st, we say the local oncologist who as our point man sent me for additional labs so as to rule out other possibilities than lymphoma. He greeted us this way: "I have nothing but good news for you today." The lung biopsy had shown that it was Valley Fever, not cancer.
May 11, we went to Santa Maria for more eye pictures. You could see that the lesion had shrunk--down from the alligator stomach.
So all of May and much of June the Fluconazole was not making obvious inroads on the eye lesion. If I covered my left eye, the face in the mirror showed brown. But all this time I could see to read and in distance my formerly good right eye was on a parity with my formerly bad left eye (which everyone now declares to be healthy). We learned that Fluconazole was probably going to have to continue all the rest of my life because nothing kills the fungus. This drug just represses it, keeps it down. No improvement for weeks.
Then on June 11 Deep Vein Thrombosis and new shots for 10 days and then new drugs which do not co-exist easily with Fluconazole. Compression stocking hip high, indefinitely.
June 20, 21, 22, 23, finally a change. I began to see the right side as normal color if I looked down in the mirror a little, though if I looked up it was brown. But there was the first improvement in color. I knew the lesion was shrinking because the blur I saw on walls at night had changed. At first it had been enormous, then after Santa Maria it had settled down to a big long watermelon, and now it was a charming naked right foot, sharply defined, and I could see that the arch was the place that made my vision better. I knew that the lesion was retreating to the north west, away from the macula and the center of vision. But would it stay that way and not regress?--for during the month one day I would see a distant point better with the right eye, another day with the left eye.
June 25, more and more pictures for the local ocular man. The lesion looks almost flat--an alligator with almost nothing in the stomach. It has firmed up from the amorphous mass first photographed on April 9. There is no reason to think the lesion will explode back over the eye, no reason to think it will invade the left eye. There is no reason to think the eye will be back to what it was in March, but I can drive and read and use the computer and will not have a film over it much longer, probably. There is finally no reason to think I will go blind from either cancer or Valley Fever. I have been getting along fine since very early May and no reason to think I won't get along a little better, still. I was lucky: the Valley Fever could have presented in the macula. As it is, I can read this without glasses.
