I had a followup with my neuro-ophthalmologist yesterday to see how my vision was improving after the issues I started having last month. I’ve tried to be optimistic and stay positive since first getting sick, but this was a tough one.

While the blurriness has lessened significantly, from an estimated 20/400 to 20/40, I still have some quite significant vision issues. Infact I was surprised to learn that my doctor didn’t expect me to recover as well as I have — he had been quite concerned the first time he saw me.

After some research, he currently thinks that all of this was caused by an very rare side effect of an antibiotic I had been taking for over a year. It’s purpose was prevent me from catching a certain type of pneumonia due to my weakened immune system. The discovery of odd-looking white blood cells (aka probably cancer) in my spinal fluid was likely just coincidental. The antibiotic caused pressure in my optical nerves, killing off some of the cells contained within. We are born with more than we need so the hope is that things will continue to improve over as long as the upcoming year, but real damage was done and that’s permanent and disappointing.

The best way I can think of to describe my current vision is that my eyes are now using crappy data cables. The world seems lower “resolution” (I have to use bigger fonts on digital devices) and the contrast and brightness of things has gone down. I have trouble telling some similar colors apart, but that varies by day and time. I had to change the colors in my code editors and I can no longer make out the individual pixels on a screen, and that really sucks.

Additionally I currently have a blind spot sort of shaped like a C in the middle of my right eye. My brain is learning to compensate for it including switching which eye is my dominate one, but it’s unlikely that the blindspot will heal. But who knows? Maybe I’ll have some good luck to counter the previous horrendous luck that I’ve had.

So overall I guess I’m lucky that things have improved as well as they have, but the fact that things are unlikely to return to perfect like they were before is hugely crushing. At the end of the day though, being able to drive again at some point is all I really want and that isn’t looking unlikely. A huge relief!