Absolutely Not For The Squeamish

I'm warning you now - turn away if you get nauseated easily, if you're not comfortable with watching surgical procedures, or you have this thing about people poking around your eyeballs (I fit neatly into that last category).

The rest of you can "enjoy" this little video snippet of a patient getting a needle stuck into their eyeball. This is the same procedure that poor Jena has had to have done a few times now, including this past Friday.

Looks kind of like A Clockwork Orange meets Silence of the Lambs.

What's going on here? Well, the patient in this vid, and Jena, are both suffering from a disease called Degenerative Myopia. The disease stretches a person's retina, and can wear it thin in some places. A thin spot on the retina is called a choroidal neovascularization (CNV). The scary thing about CNV is that it can cause partial or total loss of vision. Even more alarming is that there is no cure; some people have gone blind from the disease.

Although there is no cure, there are two procedures that can be done to help prevent CNV from advancing. The first is to inject a drug called Avastin directly into the eyeball (just like in the above movie). The second is to have laser surgery called photodynamic therapy; the CNV gets zapped by a laser beam for 83 seconds. Jena has had the former done on her eye at least three times, the latter only once so far, but she'll be going back again for another session soon.

It's so amazing to me how brave Jena has been through all of this. There is no way I would ever do this. Watching this clip confirms it. Seriously, if the doctors came to me and told me that I'd have to have this procedure done or risk going blind, I would have said "no thanks" and started learning Braille. But Jena has risen to the challenge and gone in for these injections a few times now, and has been very brave.

Braver than me, that's for certain.