Dealing With a Dilated Eye, Part 5: The Eyedrop Cocktail

This is a fifth in a series of posts on my odyssey with a dilated eye. I’ve tagged all the posts in the series here.

So …  I had a blind eye that decided to dilate. And then when I had it treated, it went bloodshot and painful and even more dilated. So I finally self-advocated my way into the office, to learn that I had really high eye pressure. And they prescribed me a solution … only it took a week for two of the drugs to process.

But now, finally, I had all four drugs in my possession:

• Brimonidine Tartrate, to lower eye pressure
• Dorzolamide-Timolol, to lower eye pressure
• Prednisolone AC, an anti-inflammatory steroid
• Atropine, a dilation medicine meant to perhaps open up my eye

The first two drugs, which I’d for a week before the remaining two arrived, had begun their work: my eye pressure had dropped from 52 down to 28. It was now time to find out if the third and fourth drops of this eyedrop cocktail could somehow return me to what I had before. Because right now I had a black ball where my brown eye was supposed to be.

For one week I took all the drugs exactly as prescribed, three of them twice a day and one of them four times a day. The four-a-day drop posed a little bit of a logistical challenge, since my wife wasn’t around at work, but a nurse graciously agreed to help with that drop.

For the next week, two things happened. One, the iris didn’t change. Two, other than a cold that was unrelated to the eye, I otherwise felt reasonably normal.

My next appointment came one week after the last one, and, for better and worse, it pretty much confirmed my observations. The optometrist said that my eye pressure was now 14 — in the range of normal. The optometrist also said that it was unlikely the iris would close again. This dilated eye was my lot in life for, potentially the rest of my life.

But he did offer a ray of hope. My ophthalmologist had previously referred me to someone about the possibility of a prosthetic contact, but the optometrist this morning decided to test out a color contact on my eye. The results: actually not too bad. Some small differences, but close enough that I might be the only person who noticed. The difference between the color contact and the prosthetic contact was a lot of money (and insurance doesn’t often cover this sort of thing) so having options was good.

I just had to decide what I was going to do.