The pain in the right eye started in mid-March and got progressively, agonizingly worse until I could not read and could only see a brown film. I have posted about the Stanford experts who were sure that I had an aggressive cancer that had moved up from a body riddled with cancer. Mention was made of removing the eye. We lived with this news for more than three weeks. We behaved better than anyone would have expected, better than we could have hoped. We behaved so well that I do not want to have to repeat it. When the local cancer man identified my illness as Valley Fever and put me on fluconazole, on 27 April, the eye within days began to get a little better. Within 10 days or so I could read, and I never used the late-arriving high quality right eye patches I had ordered.
In the meantime, a series of appointments with the local eye cancer man, who could not quite believe it was not cancer. I could track the shrinking of the lesion. At first, when I walked in a darkened room a great black tumbleweed rolled along ahead of me. I kept thinking of Absalom in the M R James tale. Then as weeks passed the shape became a big but elongated watermelon. Every time we took new photographs, the shrinking was clear--though of course I was the only one who could see the tumbleweed and the rest. July, the shape at night was down and less well defined, but by late in the month it was a small ring which became Hunter Green. Finally, at the end of August it was a tiny fish or ring then a tiny circle or semi-circle that had lots of holes in it and finally the first days of September there were only a few specks and then nothing, except the peculiar big shadow it had been trailing.
That shadow is the big damage on the eye. That may not ever be reduced. It does not affect my vision, which is back to what it was in January and February, good--toric intraocular implant just going about its business after four and a half years.
Today confirmed what I have known since the first of September--that the lesion is closed. I will see the ocular expert again in a couple of months, after the dosage of fluconazole is reduced, for more pictures. The problem is that there is no cure for Valley Fever so there could be a danger of the eye being attacked again, so I have to keep taking the anti-fungal drug and keep having new pictures, though I think I will be the first to know of any change.
The scary part, which I did not understand until today, is that the damage stopped one millimeter from the macula. As unpleasant, as downright terrifying as this has been, I was lucky, lucky. One millimeter more, blindless permanently.
Now I just have to get the blood clot in the left leg to stop hurting so I can sit and work on the new RACE book, experiences of one very big family with being white, black, and red from the 1600s on. My general health will let me get back to work--for the fluonazole must be doing good to all the places in the torso that lighted up on the Pet Scan back in April. It was hard to think of it working anywhere but the eye.
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