News interview: Colored contact lenses are dangerous

This past weekend, local ABC affiliate KXLY here in Spokane, Washington, interviewed me to ask about the dangers of wearing colored contact lenses without a prescription. Here’s a link to the story, with the interview on video.

Screenshot from interview with KXLY about the dangers of costume colored contact lenses. To watch the interview video, check out the link in the first paragraph.

Sometimes, people want to change their eye color as part of a Halloween costume, and they find contact lenses that are sold without a prescription. This is illegal, since contact lenses are medical devices — you need to have a prescription from an ophthalmologist or optometrist to buy them legally.

Contact lenses worn without a prescription are illegal because they are dangerous for your eyes. They can cause painful eye injuries, dangerous eye infections, or even blindness. I have taken care of patients who had to have their eyes surgically removed from their sockets due to a blinding eye infection from poor contact lens wear.

Return guest appearance on the AAO's "Experts InSight" podcast

I was asked to do another guest appearance on the American Academy of Ophthalmology’s podcast, “Experts InSight,” recently. I joined my friend and fellow pediatric ophthalmologist, Dr. Pavlina Kemp of the University of Iowa, and host Dr. Jay Sridhar of the University of Miami, to talk about two recent studies published in pediatric ophthalmology. The first looks at adjustable sutures in strabismus surgery, and the second at time spent outdoors as a way to limit progression of myopia.

Here’s a link to the podcast if you’d like to check it out.

Guest appearance on American Academy of Ophthalmology podcast

Recently, I joined my friends and colleagues Dr. Jay Sridhar of the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute and Dr. Pavlina Kemp of the University of Iowa on the American Academy of Ophthalmology’s podcast, “Experts InSight,” to discuss treatments strategies to slow down progression of myopia. Here’s a link to the podcast.

Some children who are nearsighted have a pretty stable prescription year after year, while others seem to get worse at a quick rate. If your daughter or son’s nearsightedness is getting worse and worse, talk with your eye doctor about options to slow this down.

Most of our discussion in this podcast centers around the use of dilute atropine eyedrops, which have been shown to be effective, well tolerated, and safe.

Stars' Eyes: Michael Jordan

I have few rules in life, but “when there’s a 10-part documentary about your childhood hero/the greatest basketball player of all time, and it’s on during the COVID pandemic so there’s nothing else to watch, and he seems like he’s having an eye problem, I write about it,” is one of them.

Some people have wondered whether MJ has jaundice. I don’t believe that to be the case. The dark brown spots on the whites of his eyes look to me like complexion-associated melanosis, also known as ethnic melanosis.

The brown pigmentation overlying the whites of the eyes in this case is likely to be complexion-associated melanosis

These brown spots are found in the conjunctiva, which is the clear covering overlying the sclera (the white part of the eyeball). They are almost always present on both eyes, and can enlarge over time. They are more common in people that have darker skin tones. They are not cancerous or precancerous, but people who have them can also develop melanoma of the conjunctiva.

If you have a brown spot on your eye, it’s best to see an eye doctor. I’m sure Michael has. But the way these is affecting both his eyes, I very much suspect this is complexion-associated melanosis.

Stars' Eyes: Steph Curry and Keratoconus

As his Golden State Warriors prepare for the NBA Playoffs, hoping to become the first team to win three consecutive championships since the 2000-2002 Los Angeles Lakers, star point guard Stephen Curry revealed the secret to his improved three-point shooting in recent weeks in an interview with The Athletic, as reported by ESPN.

The secret? Contact lenses.

Curry also reported that he has long suffered from an eye disease known as keratoconus, and that his new contact lenses have dramatically improved his vision, to the point where “it’s like a whole new world has opened up,” according to The Athletic.

Keratoconus affects the cornea, the clear, front part of the eye pictured at the left in this image.

Keratoconus is a condition that affects the cornea, which is the clear, front part of the eye which sits in front of the colored iris.

Keratoconus causes the cornea to become thinner and steeper (think of a taller mountain) than it should be, and it may progress over time.

Sometimes, keratoconus can cause painful episodes of swelling of the cornea, known as hydrops, which may result in scarring of the cornea.

Keratoconus ranges in severity from mild, to moderate, to severe. Mild disease may require no treatment at all, or simple glasses wear. More moderate disease can benefit from contact lens wear. Sometimes, large “scleral” contact lenses can be helpful, as they can neutralize the warped cornea and improve a person’s vision. For severe keratoconus, a corneal transplant can be done, where a surgeon will remove all or part of a person’s cornea and replace it with a donor cornea. Here’s a video of my friends and former colleagues, Dr. Matt Ward and Dr. Mark Greiner, doing a type of corneal transplantation surgery called a DALK, which is sometimes done for keratoconus.

In the past few years, an exciting breakthrough in treatment for patients with keratoconus has become available. It is called corneal collagen cross-linking, and there are surgeons throughout the United States that offer this procedure. Here’s an article from the American Academy of Ophthalmology that discusses cross-linking.

Have you heard of LASIK surgery? For patients considering LASIK, which helps reduce or eliminate the need for glasses and contact lenses, the surgeon will do a careful examination and diagnostic testing in the clinic before the day of surgery, looking for, among other things, signs of early keratoconus. Why? Because LASIK, if performed on a person with early keratoconus, or a tendency toward it, can dramatically accelerate the disease.

The prospect of an even more accurate Steph Curry, now that his vision has improved, is sure to strike fear in the hearts of opposing defenses.

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What eye drops should I use for pink eye?

There are three main types of conjunctivitis, or “pink eye,” as it is commonly known: viral, bacterial, and allergic, and this post focuses on the best eye drops, or treatment, for each.

Pink eye can be due to viruses, bacteria, or allergies.

Viral Pink Eye

Caused by the same viruses that can also cause the common cold — most commonly, adenovirus — viral pink eye can be a real bugger. Importantly, there are no good eye drops for treating viral pink eye.

Antibiotic eye drops won’t work, since those treat bacteria. And “get the red out” eye drops like Visine are no good either, because your eye will quickly become habituated to the tetrahydrozoline in the Visine. Tetrahydrozoline (and naphazoline, the ingredient in other, similar eye drops) are vasoconstrictors, which cause the blood vessels on the surface of the eye to constrict, so the eye appears less pink.

Sounds great, right? Well, the problem is those blood vessels become “addicted” to the medication, and when you stop using the Visine a couple of days later, you get rebound hyperemia — the blood vessels, now deprived of the medication, swell to larger than ever, making your eyes even more red and irritated than before. Visine, or other “red eye” eye drops, are never a good idea.

Bacterial Pink Eye

Fortunately, for pink eye that is caused by a bacterial infection, there are many wonderful options for eye drops. If your doctor diagnoses bacterial conjunctivitis, he or she may prescribe eye drops such as ofloxacin or polytrim, or an ointment like erythromycin. True bacterial conjunctivitis should resolve within a day or two of starting antibiotic eye drops. If it doesn’t, it’s likely not bacterial.

Allergic Pink Eye

Pink eye that is accompanied by itchy, watery eyes is often due to allergies to something in the environment. It’s easy to treat with over-the-counter ketotifen eye drops. Cold compresses can help too. Oral antihistamines can also be helpful.

For more information about pink eye, including signs and symptoms, as well as red flags, read this article.

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Podcast: Intravitreal Injection Treatment for CEP290-Leber Congenital Amaurosis

Hot off the press! Just last month, in December 2018, results from a clinical trial for a potential new treatment for patients with a blinding inherited eye disease were published in Nature Medicine.

This trial, which studied the effect of an intravitreal injection for patients with Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA) due to mutations in the CEP290 gene, showed promising results, and I was invited to join the popular “Straight From the Cutter’s Mouth: A Retina Podcast” this week to discuss the results. If you’d like to listen to the podcast, it is available at the link above, or directly via the stream below, or on iTunes. I come in around the 12:55 mark, but you should definitely listen to Dr. Ho first, one of the paper’s authors.

Between these results, and those that led to the development of a commercially-available treatment for another type of LCA, the future is bright for patients with inherited retinal disease!

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Stars' Eyes: Vivian Stancil

Between her mother dying when Vivian Stancil was just seven years old, and her father suffering from alcoholism and tuberculosis, you would think that Vivian would have already dealt with her lifetime allotment of challenges before she left grade school. But you’d be wrong.

Or perhaps you’d guess that maybe this girl who started raising her four younger siblings when their father died, before eventually living in three different foster homes, couldn’t possibly bear any more adversity. But again, you’d be wrong.

At age 19, Vivian was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic eye disease that causes gradual vision loss, and as of this writing, does not have a treatment that can reverse it. Retinitis pigmentosa causes the light-sensing cells in the retina, the rods and cones, to die, and patients with this condition typically experience difficulty seeing especially in dim light, as well as reduced peripheral vision; it can sometimes take away their central vision as well.

Despite all these hardships, Vivian — who is now legally blind — didn’t let life get her down. After earning her degree, she went on to teach kindergarten in southern California for more than two decades. After retirement, unfortunately, Vivian’s problems were far from over, as she experienced depression and became severely overweight, at more than 300 pounds at 5 feet tall.

Faced with extremely high blood pressure, and told by her doctor that he didn’t expect her to live ten more years, Vivian again beat the odds, by doing something she had never done before: swimming.

Beginning at age 50, Vivian learned to swim, and has taken to the water like, well, a fish. Counting her strokes and listening to the sound of the water hitting the lane markers to tell where she was in the pool — because, remember, she doesn’t have useful vision! — Vivian began to lose weight and become healthier. She’s lost over 100 pounds, and has become a competitive senior swimmer, winning a whopping 271 medals at the local and state level.

“What I want to tell children and adults is, ‘you can be whatever you want to be, if you put your mind to it.’ I have problems just like everybody else, but I don’t allow them to get to me. I want to be able to leave a legacy to my friends and to the community.” - Vivian Stancil, in an interview for Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls website

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Beware of Bungee Cords

I have seen people with severe traumatic injuries to their eyes from every possible cause you can imagine: knives, guns, pencils, fists, fireworks, Christmas stocking holders, tennis court net cranks, lasers, bleach, acid, fire, baseballs, hammering, bailing wire, you name it.

But, surprisingly, I have seen more patients with severe eye injuries due to bungee cords than any other single mechanism I can think of. Who would ever guess these seemingly innocuous, sort of fun-to-play-with, colorful little devils could be so dangerous?

The common story is something like this: "I was tying something down with a bungee, and the hook snapped off, and the other end came flying and hit me right in the eye. I immediately couldn't see with that eye, and it hurt like crazy."

Just earlier this week, on call, I took care of a person to whom this exact thing had happened. Thankfully, they were wearing glasses. The glasses shattered, and the eye was damaged -- in fact, part of one of the muscles that control eye alignment and movement was literally torn off the eye -- but the eye didn't rupture.

I took care of another patient who developed a significant bleed inside his eye -- known as a hyphema -- because of a bungee cord injury. Check out this photo, from EyeRounds.org. Note the small little sliver of red in front of his brown iris? Those are red blood cells floating around because the eye is bleeding on the inside. Although my patient did great, hyphema can cause high pressure and permanent vision loss.

Yet another patient of mine wasn't so fortunate. The bungee cord struck his eye with such force that it tore the eyeball open. This laceration was repaired surgically, but the eye never regained vision, became painful, and eventually was surgically removed.

My kids, when their friends are over and they see the bungee cords in our garage, know the line: "Daddy says we aren't allowed to play with those." Friends, don't let your children use these, and when you yourselves must, be VERY careful!

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Stars' Eyes: Danelle Umstead

Umstead has won three Bronze medals in alpine skiing in the Paralympic Games

Danelle Umstead is used to turning heads as she flies down the alpine slopes. An accomplished skiier, Umstead has made three Paralympic teams and won three bronze medals, an incredible feat for anyone, let alone someone with severely limited vision.

Umstead has a genetic eye condition called retinitis pigmentosa (RP), which affects the photoreceptor cells in the retina — the rods and cones — and has caused Umstead to lose her vision. Like so many people with severe eye disease, she hasn’t let this stop her.

Now, Umstead is turning heads for a different reason. Fulfilling a longstanding dream, she is competing on ABC’s fall season of “Dancing with the Stars,” partnering with Artem Chigvintsev. Umstead is the program’s first visually impaired contestant.

“I have no central vision whatsoever,” Umstead says according to an article on Team USA’s website, and also acknowledges that in her “peripheral vision, there’s big, black blind spots closing into my central. So I just have little pieces left between the two here and there.”

Patients with RP typically experience decreased vision in dim light and reduced peripheral vision, which may progress to involve their central vision as well. At the time of this writing, there is no cure for this disease. However, the future is bright for patients with inherited eye diseases like RP, thanks to the determined research and tireless efforts of many, many patients, scientists, and doctors, who have recently produced the first commercially-available treatment for an inherited eye disease, as I discuss here.

Here’s Umstead’s first performance on Dancing with the Stars, dancing the foxtrot:

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Video: What causes Amblyopia? How is Amblyopia Treated?

Here's a brand new video we made this week at the Spokane Eye Clinic, with me discussing the following topics:

• What causes amblyopia?

• How common is amblyopia?

• How is amblyopia treated?

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Stars' Eyes: Joel Embiid

Joel Embiid, 7'0" star of the Philadelphia 76ers, was back in the lineup tonight after missing a few weeks because of an orbital fracture he sustained in a March 28 game against the New York Knicks during a collision with rookie teammate Markelle Fultz.

The bones of the orbit (eye socket). Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The orbit, or "eye socket" in lay terms, is made up of seven different bones, and can be thought of as a room with a floor, walls, and a ceiling. Aside from the obvious opening at the front through which the eye is able to see, there are several other much smaller openings through which nerves and blood vessels pass.

In facial trauma, the bones that make up the orbit, like any other bones in the body, can break. Fractures of the orbit most commonly affect two sites: the thin, inner bones that make up the wall between the eye and the nose, or the bones of the "floor" of the orbit. Fractures of the thicker bones that make up the "rim" at the front of the orbit are more rare, as they require much more force.

Symptoms of orbital fracture may include pain around the eye, displacement (often backward or downward) of the eye itself, double vision, bruising around the eye, inability to move the eye in different directions, or numbness of the cheek. The diagnosis is confirmed by a computed tomogram (CT scan) of the maxillofacial area.

The oval shows a "blowout" type fracture of the floor of the left orbit.

For patients who have sustained a fracture of the orbit, an ophthalmologist is typically consulted to evaluate the eye, rule out serious vision- or even eye-threatening injuries, and to check for signs of muscle entrapment. The eye has six different muscles that attach to it, allowing it to move in all different directions, and sometimes, when the bones around the eye break, these muscles will get snagged in the fractured bone. When this happens, it usually causes double vision, inability to look up or down, and nausea, vomiting, or low heart rate when the patient tries to look up or down. Muscle entrapment is more common in children, because their bones, more flexible than adults', often break and then "snap back," trapping muscle.

Here's a video of a young patient with an entrapped muscle after an orbital fracture. This patient was seen, and the video created, by my good friends and former colleagues at the University of Iowa, Dr. Jordan Rixen and Dr. Priya Gupta.

The majority of orbital fractures do not require surgery to fix. Conservative treatments often include ice packs, antibiotics, nasal decongestants, and caution to avoid blowing the nose for a few weeks, as this can cause air to get into the eye socket through the fracture, potentially putting undue pressure on the eye and its supporting structures and causing permanent vision loss.

Reasons for a patient to have surgery to fix their orbital fracture include things like persistent double vision, an entrapped muscle, significant enophthalmos (an eye that is "sunken back" into the orbit), or a cosmetically unacceptable appearance. Surgeons typically wait for 1-2 weeks for swelling to subside before performing surgery. However, in cases of muscle entrapment, surgery is much more urgent, as the trapped muscle can lose its blood flow and become irreparably damaged if not promptly freed from the fracture.

Three days following his injury, Embiid's orbital fracture was surgically repaired by Dr. Jurij Bilyk (oculoplastic surgeon) and Dr. Howard Krein (reconstructive head and neck surgeon). No public mention has been made as to whether Embiid suffered from double vision or whether this factored into the decision to have surgery.

Embiid looked sharp in his return to action against the Heat, scoring 23 points and grabbing 7 rebounds in 30 minutes of action, all while wearing a protective mask.

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Spasmus Nutans Video

Spasmus nutans is an eye movement disorder that develops in the first two years of life, and then usually disappears before age 3-4. No one knows what causes it -- the medical term for one of these mysterious conditions is "idiopathic" -- but patients usually demonstrate three characteristics:

1. Nystagmus (eyes shaking), which is high velocity and small amplitude
2. Torticollis, which may be a head turn or tilt that the patient often uses
3. Head bobbing or nodding

Here is a video from a patient with spasmus nutans whose mother kindly allowed me to share:

Because spasmus nutans can rarely be mimicked by a serious neurologic condition, including a tumor, patients should receive an MRI scan of their brain. Fortunately, for patients with the classic findings of spasmus nutans and a negative MRI, the prognosis is very good.

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Podcast: Leber Congenital Amaurosis, CSNB, and Achromatopsia

It's Thanksgiving this week, and one of the things I'm thankful for is the blessing of great colleagues in ophthalmology. One of them, Dr. Jay Sridhar of the University of Miami, is the host of the rising star "Straight From the Cutter's Mouth" podcast, and I've enjoyed being a guest on his podcast, usually talking about inherited eye disease.

This week, we talked about Leber congenital amaurosis (a hot topic recently), as well as congenital stationary night blindness (CSNB), and achromatopsia. Happy Thanksgiving!

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Giving Sight to the Blind: First Treatment for Leber Congenital Amaurosis Gains FDA Approval

On Tuesday, December 18, 2017, the United States Food and Drug Administration approved the first ever gene therapy for an inherited disease. Patients with a type of Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), a blinding childhood eye disease, due to mutations in the RPE65 gene will now be able to receive treatment to improve their sight. This is a landmark day, and one which countless scientists, physicians, and patients have worked toward for decades.

LCA is a genetic condition which causes severe vision loss and blindness in childhood. Affected children are often born with very poor vision, and parents may notice their child never seems to make eye contact, has roving eye movements, or nystagmus, where the eyes shake back and forth. Almost all LCA is autosomal recessive, meaning each parent is a carrier for the disease, that each child of these two parents will have a 25% risk of developing the disease, and that affected individuals have a <1% chance of passing it on to their future children. Until the late-2017 FDA approval of voretigene, there were precisely zero commercially-available treatments for LCA.

Fortunately, and miraculously, this is changing.

Scientists have developed a treatment, called voretigene neparvovec (Luxturna is the trade name), which can be given to patients with this specific type of LCA. This treatment is a type of gene therapy, which means that the correct version of the defective gene is given to the patient, allowing the RPE65 protein product to perform its normal function in the eyes (RPE65 is an enzyme involved in recycling Vitamin A in the visual cycle).

Voretigene makes use of a benign virus to carry the correct version of the RPE65 gene into the patient's eyes. The patient undergoes a surgery, under general anesthesia, during which voretigene is injected very carefully, by highly trained vitreoretinal surgeons, underneath the retina.

I have seen several patients who underwent this treatment during voretigene's clinical trial. I was very impressed with the results -- children with no functional vision were suddenly able to see well enough to navigate the room. Results from the phase 3 clinical trial were published recently in the prestigious journal Lancet, with my friend and training mentor Dr. Stephen Russell of the University of Iowa as the lead author.

Voretigene represents a historic breakthrough on multiple levels. Not only is it the first medical treatment for a previously untreatable disease, allowing blind people to see for the first time, but it is also the first gene therapy for an inherited disease of any kind. It will also pave the way for future research and development of similar treatments for similar diseases. As a pediatric ophthalmologist and inherited eye disease specialist, it is difficult to overstate how excited I am about this! 

Curious as to what kind of a difference this treatment can really make? Check out these next two videos. The first shows a boy with RPE65-LCA trying to navigate an obstacle course prior to his treatment. Notice how much he struggles.

Now, watch this same boy, a few months after treatment with voretigene, navigating a similar obstacle course. It's a night-and-day difference!

The future is bright for people with LCA and other inherited eye disease, and I enjoy dedicating part of my practice to holding a special clinic just for patients with these conditions.

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The Secret

My dad has a gift.

Opened packages of socks. Special order furniture. A worn, washed, and shrunken J. Crew sweater that was disclosed as worn, washed, and shrunken. You name it, the man has successfully returned it.

He routinely pulls off returns that most of us wouldn't dream of attempting. In fact, in the 35 years I have known him, the only item he's ever failed at returning was a Christmas gift box of nuts from Western Nut Company. Though occasionally frustrating to those who give him gifts, Dad's ability to exchange what he has for something he wants more -- another item, store credit, usually cash -- has long since held my respect and interest.

Initially, I figured that his incredible track record was mostly attributable to his height; being a tall drink of water doesn't help on airplanes, but it must help when you're trying to return something, right? 

I've since realized that Dad's success didn't have nearly as much to do with his height as it did with his personality. I've seen him in action -- he treats the store's employee with respect, smiles, and is never rude or angry or dismissive. He knows The Secret: if you're nice to people, they are much more likely to help you.

Now, we have to be careful here, because being nice to people is not a means to an end. Feigning interest and respect just to get what one wants is often transparent and annoying. Ideally, we are genuinely nice to people for the sake of being nice. Living this way pays dividends not just in terms of getting what you want, but also in happiness and friendship. That being said, there is no doubt that being nice to those around you will make them more willing to help you.

This widely-applicable principle is easily recognizable in the medical field. A physician taking care of patients in the hospital often receives messages from his patients' nurses. Although he may be busy, stressed by caring for his patients, documenting his care properly, declining reimbursement, home life, etc etc etc, if he is rude, dismissive, condescending, or abrupt with the nurse, although the nurse will still perform the necessary duties to care for their patients, he or she will undoubtedly remember the negative interaction and be much less likely to go the extra mile for that physician in the future. That feeling of being treated poorly doesn't go away easily.

By contrast, consider a surgeon who is frustrated from struggling to have her patient transported to the operating room from the hospital floor. She has a clinic she has to get to in the afternoon, and things are running late. She is tempted to call up the ward's nursing station and demand to know where her patient is. Instead, she calls the ward, and asks to know who is taking care of her patient. When she gets ahold of the right nurse, she uses his or her name, and thanks them for taking care of her patient. She asks politely about whether they will soon be ready to head to the operating room, instead of barking out a demand. She asks, sincerely, whether there is anything she can do to help.

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

— Maya Angelou

The nurse in the second situation is likely to remember being treated respectfully, and to respond favorably when the surgeon needs help in the future. The nurse in the first scenario, however, is much less likely to do so. Doctors who value other members of the team, including nurses, secretaries, schedulers, technicians, janitors, and others, who learn their names and act like a real human being around them, will be surprised not only by others' willingness to help, but by real, abiding friendships that will develop.

I'm grateful to my Dad for what he taught me about being nice to others. Maybe he wasn't just trying to return a pair of socks.

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Dieffenbachia: Needles in Your Eyes

While wandering through the greenhouse at beautiful Manito Park here in Spokane recently, I came across this plant:

I had never seen a Dieffenbachia before, and I must admit I recoiled a bit. The reason? The sap of this plant contains needle-like crystals, which, if they contact the eye, can lodge in the cornea, the clear layer in front of the iris, or colored part of your eye. Although these crystals dissolve spontaneously over several weeks to months, while present, they cause intense eye pain and sensitivity to light.

The cornea is the clear layer at the front of the eye, through which light passes. If it is disrupted, pain and light sensitivity often result.

These crystals, made up of calcium oxalate, are found in tiny structures in the leaves and stem of the plant known as idioblasts. These idioblast cells, when stimulated by even mild pressure, rupture, and forcefully expel their contents onto unsuspecting onlookers.

Interestingly, the plant is named after the German physician and botanist Joseph Dieffenbach. Its first name, however, was "dumbcane," because the painful swelling of the tongue caused by chewing it would render a person effectively unable to speak. Also of note, Dr. Dieffenbach is particularly near and dear to my heart as a strabismus surgeon, because he was the very first surgeon to weaken the medial rectus muscle to treat esotropia.

Be sure to give these plants wide berth next time you see them!

Podcast: Retinitis Pigmentosa

I recently had the privilege of joining the Four-Timers Club as a guest on the excellent Straight From the Cutter's Mouth podcast. During this episode, host Dr. Jay Sridhar and I reviewed retinitis pigmentosa and some systemic syndromes, such as Usher syndrome and Bardet-Biedl syndrome, that include retinitis pigmentosa as part of the condition.

Here's a link to subscribe to this top-notch podcast on iTunes.

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The Solar Eclipse: Even Better than Expected!

Rarely does an event with as much hype as the 2017 Solar Eclipse live up to expectations. Preparing for this week's eclipse, I was moderately excited and figured it would be a neat thing to see, but I anticipated feeling a little let down when I actually saw it. I was wrong!

Leading up to the eclipse, I was honored to be interviewed on the local CBS Evening News, discussing why and how to view it safely. Here's a link if you'd like to see the video.

On the day of the eclipse, I was in the operating room, doing surgery for patients with strabismus to help realign their eyes. In between surgeries, I had a minute to peek out the window and see the eclipse as it was developing. Here in Spokane, we weren't in the path of totality, and because of the surgery schedule, I didn't get to see the partial eclipse at its maximum, but I was caught off guard by how cool it was. Seeing a crescent sun in a black sky with my eclipse glasses was definitely neat.

I was also pleasantly surprised to see the social media reaction -- it seems I wasn't the only one who found the eclipse incredibly cool. Videos from all over the country, especially those from people in the path of totality, showcased what an incredible experience this was.

If you looked at the eclipse in an unsafe way, and are now experiencing decreased vision or a blind or dark spot in your central vision in one or both eyes, you may have a condition called solar retinopathy. Solar retinopathy is a burn, caused by ultraviolet light, of the retina, the inner lining of the back of your eyes, and the home of the rod and cone cells that sense light. There is no treatment for solar retinopathy, and although some patients' symptoms may improve over the ensuing months, other people's vision loss may be permanent. If you think you may have this problem, you should see your eye doctor.

Today, the local CBS Evening News invited me back for another interview, to discuss solar retinopathy symptoms and what to do if you think the eclipse may have damaged your eyes. Here's the video of the interview.

Finally, here is a video generously shared with me by my friend Melanie Slater Munns, which shows the magical moment when the lights go out during the eclipse in the path of totality:

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The Power of Good News

Recently, I had the opportunity to see a young boy in my clinic, a great little guy who had had a bit of a rocky start to life. He had been born four months premature, and had sustained an intraventricular hemorrhage, a type of bleeding within the brain that is, unfortunately, quite common in severely premature infants. To reduce the swelling and pressure in his head created by this bleeding, a shunt was placed, which drained fluid from around the brain into his abdomen.

Between this brain hemorrhage and a number of other medical problems, my little patient's first few years were tough. His mother had been told that, because of the swelling, he had likely suffered some damage to his optic nerves, the structures that connect the back of the eye to the brain, and transmit the signal that the eye sees to the cerebral cortex for processing.

Fortunately, when I examined his eyes, I was able to get a good look at his optic nerves, and they appeared very healthy -- flat and pink, just like they should be, with no swelling, pallor, or hemorrhage. I told Mom that her son's optic nerves looked great, and that I was encouraged by that. Her response caught me off guard.

She said, somberly but matter-of-factly, "That's great. We never get good news."

This made me feel very sad.

One of the blessings of my job is that I work with kids all day -- kids who are often, though not always, generally quite healthy. This means that my experience in the "doctor's office" (in this case, my own), is usually very positive and full of good news.

This young family, by contrast -- and many others like them -- has a much different typical doctor's office experience. Because of the many, severe health problems their son has dealt with, his physicians have, unfortunately but appropriately, had to give an awful lot of bad news.

Sometimes as physicians, we may forget how devastating a seemingly endless parade of bad news can be.

My friend Dr. Erin Schotthoefer, a fellow pediatric ophthalmologist who also did her ophthalmology residency at the University of Iowa like I did, taught me something very profound. During a lecture given 10 years after finishing her training, she told the audience that, for every patient she saw, she always tried to find at least one bit of good news she could share, one thing about which the child's parents should be happy and encouraged.

Inspired by her words, I have tried to do the same in my practice, and have found it both possible and powerful. Sometimes, we all just need something to hold on to, and findings those things and sharing them is one of my favorite parts of what I do.

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