When in doubt Always Ask the Professional

I am sharing this because, within the past few days or weeks, I have been having a recurrent situation with my patients about not seeking professional medical opinion before making major life decisions for their ocular health for which the effect has been detrimental in the majority of the cases.

I do not give them all the blame because I feel perhaps if they had known better things may have been different, perhaps they didn't fully grasp the intensity of the situation which is why they did what they did, unfortunately, their ignorance wasn't enough to excuse for their systems to protect them or keep their vision safe and intact for them.

My first patient in this story was a 25-year-old female who presented to the clinic with burning sensations, foreign body sensations in the eye, some amount of pain felt in the eye, and intermittent headaches that seemed to get worse when she was exhausted. Both eyes looked injected and after eye examinations were conducted the impression was that she had an inflamed pterygium (there was a growth on the eye, specifically the conjunctiva) and had to be given medication, topical and oral.

From discussions, I discovered that she was well aware of her pterygium, as at the time she was diagnosed it was very small perhaps negligible, and was given some medication and lenses to use to shield the eye from the factors that promote pterygium growth such as UV. The patient in question took the lens, placed it somewhere, and didn't use the drugs because she concluded she would be fine without them. Now years later, she comes to see me, and her pterygium has now grown to the point of penetrating the cornea thus demanding a minor surgical excision process.

She now cries in my office because she doesn't want surgery and feels like she could have avoided it by sticking to the doctor's advice or even informing him before stopping the medication because then the doctor may have given her instructions on what to do.

Our second patient is a 27-year-old male who was also diagnosed with glaucoma at around the age of 14. He was put on Timolol and Travaprost. His pressures were quite high, however after using the drug for about 2 years he decided to stop because he had faith that God would heal him (not to undermine anyone's faith please) and that he couldn't be on a particular drug for the rest of his life.

Now almost a decade down the line, he comes to see me to complain about his vision being bad, and upon probing I came to realize he was on antiglaucoma drugs and decided to stop out of his own volition. After explaining to him that any damage to the optic nerve is irreversible and that any visual damage may probably be permanent as of now, he got scared and ended up crying.

Meanwhile, this could have easily been avoided. If only he had consulted his doctor before deciding to stop, then perhaps we would be here now, Now we seek to check his visual fields and we are only optimistic that things aren't as bad as they anatomically look.