**EP320: Blindsided (Almost)**
**Dr. Auric Bishop:** Welcome, my name's Dr. Auric Bishop. I'm a cardiologist, I'm an author, and a keynote speaker. I'm the CEO of the Healthy Heart Network. I'm all about trying to help people live as well as possible for as long as possible. Heart disease is huge in Australia. Every 20 minutes, someone suffers a heart attack. Most of these could probably have been avoided if only we knew what to do. This podcast is all about helping you understand blood pressure, weight, cholesterol, for better health. If you enjoy this podcast, I would be honoured for a five-star review. You can share it with your family and friends. It may well save someone you love.
**Dr. Warwick Bishop:** Hi, my name is Dr. Warwick Bishop, and welcome to my podcast and videocast station. Thank you for joining me. I'm always grateful that you take the time to listen, tune in, and maybe learn a bit, and hopefully get a little bit of information that just helps you on your own health journey. Well, today is a sharing day. You may have guessed from the title that being blindsided is sort of being surprised. Well, I'm using it as a bit of a play on words because I'm going to share with you my own story.
To have my glasses checked, I'm approaching 60 years of age, and I'm guessing there's a mix of ages out there listening to this at the moment. My guess is some of you might be able to relate. Look, I have been wearing glasses since about 50 odd years of age. The set of glasses I got maybe two to three years ago were tremendous. And for anyone who's ever worn glasses, you would know that when you get a brand new set of glasses, the world is just fantastic and vibrant because your acuity has all been readjusted and sorted out, so you get this beautiful clarity in the world.
Well, I got these new glasses, was driving around, and for some reason or quirk, I was noticing that if I looked through one eye versus the other eye, in particular, the right eye seemed to be a little bit blurred. It didn't seem quite right. Now, the person who organized my glasses prescription was a stand-in for my regular optometrist. So I actually called my regular optometrist and said, "Hey, I'm not 100% sure that the eye is as good as it should be, or maybe the prescription, the lens isn't quite right. But my eye is a bit, well, it's just not as clear as it could be."
Matt, my optometrist, said, "Come in straight away," and checked out my eye. The left eye was fine. The right eye, though, he thought was cloudy and didn't look quite right. Immediately, he sent me to an ophthalmologist. Now, an optometrist is someone who tends to do the lens prescriptions; an ophthalmologist is a doctor who specializes in eyes. The ophthalmologist he sent me along to was, in fact, someone I knew because I'd done some training with them, and Kate squeezed me in within days.
Turns out she confirmed what Matt had thought, and I did have clouding within my eye. Now, for anyone who's had any medical illness, I'm sure you can already appreciate that at this stage I was getting just a little bit uneasy and having a sense of apprehension. Further investigation done by Kate, and she dilated my eyes and looked in with special bits of equipment and lenses and lights and all the other stuff, led to her identifying two small tears in my retina. She then referred me to a retinal specialist in the same practice. Within days, I saw Andrew, who then lasered those tears. If you can imagine, their laser acted as a way to glue down or tack down the edges of those tears so there was nothing further to tear or come loose.
I will add, for anyone who ever has to go through the procedure, I found this a deeply visceral and uncomfortable process. And because I hadn't ever been through the process before, I'd actually organized to go back to work afterward. My recommendation, and subsequently my experience, has been: do not go back to work if you have laser to your retina. My first afternoon, having had the procedure, was one of the most miserable times at work I'd ever had.
Well, where's this going? It turns out that Kate found another small tear in the left eye about a year later. This was dealt with again with laser therapy by Andrew again. This time it wasn't as bad, not as painful, and it was in a different location in the eye. I was advised that the cause was spontaneous because of age, which I found quite hard to believe—a difficult pill to swallow, in fact. But these things happen as you get a bit older. Turns out your eye actually changes shape and size a little bit as you get older, and so you can get spontaneous tears, and that's what happened to me.
Well, with all this checking of my eyes, Kate, my regular ophthalmologist, was checking my pressure in the eyes regularly, and it turned out that they were starting to creep up. There was no family history of increased pressures in my eye. But nonetheless, they were borderline and borderline elevated. And because the pressures in the eye need to be watched closely and are closely linked to the fluid movement within the eye, Kate recommended that I have a small procedure, again done by laser, but this time to the iris to open up a channel to allow better drainage of fluid within the eye to reduce increased pressures in the eye.
Now, I had a small hole burnt in by laser to both eyes—bilateral laser iridotomy. Well, why am I telling you all that? Well, prior to Christmas, having been about a year post these procedures with the small holes being made to improve drainage within my eyes, I noticed again my right eye was playing up in terms of visual acuity. I also noticed that the right eye was feeling a bit, I don't know, heavy—not quite right. I think I was getting irritable with it. I possibly let it drift along for a couple of weeks because it fluctuated. Some days seemed different to others until just before Christmas, I went to work and really was convinced that there was something not quite right. The eye didn't feel right. The visual acuity in my right eye wasn't right. I texted Kate, who immediately made arrangements for me to go into the eye clinic, where they tested my pressures and found that the right eye pressure was 37, the left eye pressure 18, normal somewhere around 15 to 20. So that meant my right eye had raised intraocular pressure.
Well, why is that a problem? Well, this is what I want to tell you. Raised intraocular pressure puts strain on the nerves within the eyeball and, in fact, on the optic nerve, and left unattended for too long can start to lead to the death of the optic nerve. The consequence is a reduction in visual field and, subsequently, a reduction in visual acuity and sight. Glaucoma affects millions of people worldwide and is referred to at times as the silent thief of sight.
Why am I telling you about it? Well, when they tested my right eye, I was incredibly nervous, as you might expect, but I was also incredibly pleased to find out that there'd been no loss of visual field, which means that my condition was called raised intraocular pressure rather than raised intraocular pressure leading to damage. When you get damage, it's called glaucoma.
Why do I want to let you know about it? Because it's rife, and if you don't check for it, you won't know about it. It was perhaps only good luck that I bothered to get my own eyes checked because it just didn't seem right. I can't tell you how lucky I feel that I bothered to text Kate and let her know I didn't think things were quite right.
So now I'm taking drops. I don't know if you take drops or not. I hate my eyes being touched, so putting drops in my eyes absolutely sucks. Not enjoying it at all, but I think I've figured a way to do it on a regular basis because I have to confess that, between you and me, putting drops in my eyes seems far less of a challenge than letting my vision deteriorate with time.
Well, what are the risk factors? Age is probably one of the most important; it can run in families. So if you are getting around my age, please make sure you get your eyes checked regularly. The only way you really know is to have that intraocular pressure measured. And they do that with one of those things that puffs on your eyeball. I don't like that. It's called tonometry, and it always makes me cringe a bit because I'm very sensitive with my eyes. But you just got to suck it up and get checked because the alternate universe is far worse.
The really good news is if it's identified, it can be managed. So I'm on drops at the moment, I'm heading back to see Kate in a couple of months, and we may well talk about ongoing drops, perhaps alternate surgical procedures—I really don't know. But I do know that I'll be keeping a close eye on my eyes.
Where do I want to leave that? I really, really want to underline the importance of maintenance in your own health journey. I talk about heart disease all the time. I'm getting involved with osteoporosis and osteopenia because of a franchise that my partner and I have opened. And I've just given you an experience about eyeballs. I really, really want you guys to start to think about how you can be proactive to look after your health—your heart, your eyes, your bones, your gut. Do your bowel cancer screening test kit if you haven't. Turns out about 50% of people don't even do that free test, which is just insane.
Anyway, I do want to wish you the very best. As always, thank you for listening this far in. I hope you've learned something either for yourself or to share with someone you love. If you have any queries or questions, of course, drop us a note. I think you know where to do that. If you've got any suggestions for other podcasts, you can let us know as well.
For now, though, I am going to wish you the very best. I hope you live as well as possible for as long as possible. Take care and bye for now.
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