A Year After Losing My Eye to Ocular Melanoma

Update about how I’m coping with monocular vision

Author’s note: This is a very personal post, which is why it’s behind the paywall.

“I either have a brain tumor or I need eye surgery,” I was only half joking to my husband as I laced up my shoes. “Mark my words.”

This was at the end of April, 2022.

It takes a lot to get me to the doctor.

Conventional doctors are fantastic when it comes to setting bones and saving heart attack patients. But, barring a true emergency, I do everything I can to avoid allopathic medicine.

Still, the vision issues I was having weren’t getting better.

For one thing, it was becoming increasingly difficult for me to see when I was driving, especially at my night. That was okay, I rationalized, since I’ve never liked to drive.

But then I noticed that I was having trouble concentrating and it was becoming difficult to focus my eyes on the computer without feeling queasy. For a writer who makes her living at the computer and needs to look at screens every day, this was a problem I could no longer ignore.

At first, I thought I had floaters in both eyes, caused, perhaps, by early-onset cataracts. Then, after a quick and disturbing internet search, Dr. Google suggested that I had a detached retina.

In any case, it was time to go in. I was headed, finally, to the eye doctor.