The times that try our souls

Today was a very bad day. Central retinal artery occlusion. Zora lost all vision in her left eye. Almost assuredly permanently and irreversibly.

We're in San Francisco.

Zora went to bed at 1AM with something strange happening to vision. She woke up at 3AM and could not see at all out of her left eye. I did a flashlight test and saw that the pupil wasn’t dilating. I’ve only seen that in dead people. I called up my friend Jenny, the doctor, who got her MD/PhD here in San Francisco, and asked her what hospital to go to. We went to UCSF.

There was basically nothing they could do. Actually, what they could do was not at all high-science. It included breathing into a paper bag and massaging the eye. A small clot had lodged in her eye artery. The attempt was to the lower the pressure in the eye to sort of vacuum the clot out. It didn’t work. 3 to 4 hours without blood kills the retina. As a last-ditch effort, they stuck a needle in her eye to draw out some fluid to further lower the pressure. Nothing worked. They should have tried leeches.

I was very bad and hard to believe that her vision could go from 100% to 0% in a few hours.

Now her eye hurts like fuck. From the needle. Really hurts. But it should get better. Zora is a strong woman. Her eye really hurts. And she’s blind in it.

My mom is also blind in her left eye. Zora didn’t know this. My mom bikes and drives. But it probably means Zora and I won’t be sitting in the third row of movies like I like.

I’d like to get Zora back to New York. Everything is kind of fucked. There’s the fear of getting on a plane and having a stroke. Or, God forbid, loosing vision in her other eye. But doctors still say the risk is low. But that doesn’t help her left eye.

Tomorrow morning they do another TEE. The MRI and the CAT scan all came back good (she didn’t have a stroke). And the echo they did doesn’t seem much changed from the previous ones, which is good.

There is a good group of friends and family here. Zora’s dad and his girlfriend. Jim and Daphne and Heidi. If I were a hospital tourist, I would like the change of scenery. And the hospitals here are cleaner and give you your own room and have nicer and better nurses. And people with degrees use words like “awesome” and “random.” But we think the surgeon at Mt. Sinai, Dr. Dave Adams, is better. And that’s pretty important at this point.

Along with meeting about 20 new doctors today, I talked many times with the New York doctors, Dr. Gumprecht, the Good Doctor, and also with the Mt. Sinai surgeon, Dr. Adams. We also met the UCSF surgeon. He seems good. But he’s no Dr. Adams.

Both surgeons independently seem pretty much on the same page. Surgery is still not super urgent. But it will most likely happen very soon. And even though surgery isn’t urgent, that doesn’t help Zora’s eye. Or explain it.

I’ve been up pretty much for 2 days straight. I love Zora so much.