Fido Revisited

9 February 2013

Yesterday I had my first visual field exam since April 2010, which was four months after Fido appeared.

Fido is my blind spot.

It happened on the morning of January 12, 2009.  I'd slept badly, skipped the gym, and was getting ready to go to work when the bottom third of my right field of vision started flashing. Long story short, after nearly a month of other potential diagnoses ranging from migraine to stroke, I was diagnosed with "Multiple Evanescent White Dot Syndrome," a diagnosis of exclusion.  I was left with a hazy blind spot in my right field of vision.  It looked like the head of a Siberian husky in profile.  On the gurney in the ER that first morning, I named it Fido.

The neuro-opthalmologist who diagnosed me was the first of all the doctors to see the spot on my retina.  He thought it looked more like an elephant than a dog.

At the time, I could make objects disappear behind Fido.  The color of an LCD screen, Fido was fun to play with in Spinning class.  I could close my left eye and make numbers vanish from the display.  When an edge of a wall or an elevator door passed through Fido, it would shimmer.  When I walked out of a bright room, Fido was there, yellow in the darkness.

By the end of the year, Fido resembled a high-heeled shoe, best seen if my eyes were closed against bright light.  Nowadays, I have to stare at the ceiling first thing on a bright morning, my good eye closed, to catch a glimpse of Fido.  Nothing disappears behind him anymore; all he can do is blur a few words on a page.

I'd never seen a picture of my retina until I went to a new eye doctor last week.  My pupils dilated, she took pictures and turned the computer screen towards me.  That was no fair;  I couldn't focus.  I asked for a copy, but HIPAA rules had the computer disconnected from the office network.  I'd have to pay $100 for a copy.

So, yesterday, when I returned for the visual field test, I took pictures of the screen with my phone.  HIPAA be damned, here's my retina for the whole world to see, hundred dollars or not.

This is not a boob.  It's my right retina as seen by the camera.  The bright spot to the right is my optic nerve (which shows remnants of glial activity, a sign of a past inflammation).  The dark spot in the center is the macula.  If you look just above it, you'll see a faint, pale arc, like an eyebrow over the macula.  That's what's left of Fido.

 

Remember, though, that what we see is upside-down from the signal the retina gets from the lens (which our brain then corrects). I'll have to flip the picture to show you what Fido looks like to me.

I've circled Fido:

This is sort of what I see now, a pale, pale, pale gray shadow if I look hard at a white wall:

This is what I saw about a year after Fido happened:

This is as close as I can get to drawing Fido as he appeared after a few months.  He used to look much more like a dog than this.  He used to have jagged edges.

When had my records from Scheie Eye Institute mailed to me in 2010, the visual field test results, which had been printed on thermal paper, were missing.

All I have now are the results from yesterday, which I've altered to show you, more or less, what the test results looked like when Fido first happened:

This is the printout from yesterday:

Why am I feeling sad that Fido is gone?  It's because I gave my blind spot a name, isn't it?