Sympathetic Eyes

The eye is designed not to be punctured - and at a guess given the choice, no one's would be. But when it is, it releases fluid (uveal pigment) unknown to the rest of your body into the bloodstream. Sometimes your body will create antibodies to it which then attack the good eye, thinking it's foreign. This autoimmune disease is called Sympathetic Ophthalmia (SO) and it's what we've been worried about for the last two weeks.

Nick hasn't been comfortable since his plane went down, yet the worst of it hasn't been the ruptured eye as I would've thought, but the good eye. He can't bear light; he finds it piercing even with his eyes closed, and looking at a computer screen is particularly painful. When trying to read, the middle of his vision is blurred, so he reads from the periphery. He's had his eyes closed for much of the last month.

So... although the condition is very rare (so is AB- blood and my veins are full of it!), it exists, and when the symptoms really started showing themselves, his sister Sophie asked an eye doc friend for advice. He said to start steroids in the good eye (which we already happened to have for his left eye) until we got home from France, as that's the first course of action with SO. Left untreated, SO will lead to blindness in the good eye. Here's something I lifted from MedicineNet.com:

Sympathetic ophthalmia has been known since the time of Hippocrates. The writer James Thurber (1894-1961) was left blind in one eye by an arrow during a game of William Tell. Sympathetic opthalmia rendered him totally blind by his 40s.


Twenty-four hours door-to-door and we were home again late Monday night. Tuesday morning after the girls had left for school we started with the doctor appointments, the eye doc being our highest priority. He checked Nick's good eye and found none of the sure signs of SO.  **exhale**   The eye is definitely sympathizing with the hurt one and exhibiting all kinds of distress, but they are things that will get better over time.

No one was more relieved than Nick. But I can say I'm shouldering a lighter yoke today too.