I recently found out that my maternal grandmother has glaucoma, and my paternal grandfather has cataracts. It's funny then, that I should work at a glaucoma specialty clinic! I mentioned this newly acquired knowledge to one of the doctors today, and she said, "Make yourself a chart. Let's do your gonioscopy, dilation, and photos, now." Glaucoma can be hereditary, and having a family history significantly increases your risk of having it yourself.
I grabbed my chart and joked that I'd seat myself in a room and do my own screening. So this is what our patients endure, eh? Besides the preliminary vision screening that I conduct, I honestly have no idea what happens at the clinic.
Dr. T puts numbing drops into my eyes. They stain my lash line a sickly yellow, but their effect is instant. I used to wince when I saw the tonopen (this pen-like device that touches the cornea to measure eye pressure) zip onto patient's eyes, but I really felt nothing. I did, to my embarrassment, shudder visibly when it happened. One patient told me last week that bright lights make him sneeze, so I suppose it's not the weirdest reflex ever. My intraocular pressure is within normal limits, yay!
Then. Dr. T shines a bunch of lights into my eyes and uses the gonioscope to look at the angle between the iris and the cornea of my eye. That too, touches the surface of the eye. I saw it coming straight at me, and I shuddered again. Haha. I don't know if that makes me a difficult patient, but at least I keep my eyes open for receiving eye drops for dilation.
I go back to work for about twenty minutes while my eyes are dilating. I notice my vision getting blurrier and blurrier and blurrier, until I finally can't read the computer screen. My coworker just laughs as I lean in close to reschedule a patient on the tiny interface, and then I go downstairs to do my visual field exam.
Our Russian Lady Technician tells me to sit down at a machine and gives me instructions for clicking an iclicker-like device whenever I see lights. This is what patients refer to as "the video game" or "ugh" or "I hate that test." It's seriously a mind game--I don't know if I'm really seeing lights or not! I click at irregular intervals and hope that it doesn't mean my visual field is unusually limited for a person my age. And it got kind of boring after about five minutes (per eye!). I can see why some patients fall asleep and then their results are rendered unreliable. And oh, my results were also dubbed unreliable...apparently I looked around too much. Whoops. It's hard to focus on a little orange light!
After that, I get fundus photos taken. And that was probably the worst part. As I looked into the bright lights with dilated pupils, Russian Lady Technician kept reprimanding me--"Conie, Conie! Your eyes water. Here wipe with tissue! Blink, blink. Now...no good, Conie! Again!" And that was just holding my eyes open for the setup! The actual photo-taking was the brightest light imaginable, and afterwards, tears were running down my face. Sigh. I'm a wuss. But my optic nerve looks good, apparently.
Then, I get my CCT, a cornea thickness measuring test. My eyes get numbed again, and then Russian Lady Technician basically stabs (gently!) my eye with a hand-held pen-like device. It was pretty cool, actually! By then my eyes were so watery that the stabbing created like a rippling effect in my vision with no pain. That was probably my favorite part--feeling like I was watching a pond ripple from a falling leaf or something. Only...that pond was my eye. Anyways, my cornea thickness was within normal range.
All in all, I don't have glaucoma! YAY!
After that, it was closing time--and thank God, because my pupils were incredibly dilated and light sensitive. Good thing I brought my sunglasses, because as cool as giving away free wrap-around "sunglasses" to our patients is, I don't really want to stand out on my commute home. Which, by the way, was horrible because I couldn't read signs or open my eyes in the sunlight (why did SF have to be sunny today?!) Now, seven hours later, I can see well enough to type out this blog post. That seems like an unreasonably long time--our doctors usually say it wears off in 3-5 hours! No wonder people like late afternoon appointments, because there was no going back to work for me after that.
Anyways, get your eyes checked if you have a family history of glaucoma! :)
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