It's starting to shrink!

Wow, it’s been 61 days since my last blog post. So little has happened since then! Well, actually, last Friday, the 7^th, Angel and I were in San Francisco for a 3 month follow-up appointment with Dr. Char. The gist of what we learned was that things are progressing pretty nicely. The sub-retinal fluid that had accumulated has pretty much all been reabsorbed, and there are signs that the tumor has started to shrink. The size of the tumor’s footprint hasn’t changed. Actually, as far as I could tell, they didn’t measure the size of the footprint, but from their experience they say that the footprint never changes so I think they sort of assumed that mine didn’t change either. However, the maximum depth of the tumor has decreased from 4.8mm right before treatment to 4.5mm. This was excellent and surprising news, as they rarely see any signs of shrinkage at the 3 month time point (must have been the cold swim my eye and I took right before the appointment).

The picture that I got this time was taken from a slightly different angle than last time, so it’s hard to tell anything by looking at the picture. It’s still cool to look at though, so here’s a comparison between the old and the new pictures.

New

Old

Interestingly, the amount of vision that I have in that eye hasn’t yet improved very much. On the visual field test, I saw an extra 6 spots this time that I didn’t see last time (79 out of 120 this time, so not very much of a change considering that a lot more of the retina is back in place now).

New

Old

That’s pretty much it for medical updates. We met some cool people in the waiting room at Dr. Char’s office and had some good conversation while my eyes were too dilated to focus on them. They actually come down to Mesa every year to watch some baseball. If you guys read this, send me an email when you are heading down…maybe we can get together for a beer or something.

Getting good news from the doc made the rest of the weekend much easier to enjoy. Thanks to Andy and Ellie for helping us out with an awesome place to stay. We got together with our friend Jessica for dinner at a sushi boat place (a bunch of sushi dishes float past you down a little moat-like thing and you grab what you want as it floats by. Angel and I got to visit Alcatraz, which is always a cool thing to see. We also had a great time with our friends Ben and Katherine, making a round trip across the Golden Gate bridge ON FOOT. According to Wikipedia, that’s a 3.4 mile walk. Then we had an incredible dinner at an Italian restaurant called Il Pollaio…the best rib eye steak I’ve ever had, along with some grilled chicken and grilled rabbit. I highly recommend that place.

That’s pretty much it for this update. I’ll see the retinal specialist in Mesa next month, then I’m due for some blood work, and possibly a scan of some sort in a few months. See y’all around!