Every Six Months.

I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that it’s taken me 22 years to hear a “Well….” from my ophthalmologist and a recommendation to come back in six months.

Let me back up.

As most of  you know, yearly dilated eye exams are recommended for all of us with non-functioning islet cells. My appointment was this afternoon and because every other eye exam has always been relatively uneventful, I didn’t really think twice about it. In the past, when I’ve seen an ophthalmologist, I always hear something about one or two microbleeds but that they’re “totally normal” and “nothing to worry about.” And I leave thinking everything’s fine, no big deal, see you next year.

Today was almost like that.

I arrive, get settled in with Dr. B and I tell her that my husband and I are thinking about pregnancy in the next year and that I want to make sure everything is good on that front. After I get my eyes dilated, we do a retinal photography scan because it can show my doc a lot of detail about my eye.

As she’s looking at the giant photograph of my retina (which I can barely see, because of said dilation), she tells me that she’s noticing a few more microbleeds on my eye. One, she notes, looks to be the same as the one before, but now there are a couple others. They are tiny, she says. Really small. But she also shows me a white dot — the dots can be white now? — which has a technical term that I can’t remember and is from a lack of oxygen to part of my eye.

So that’s fun.

Dr. B kept telling me over and over how tiny these bleeds were, how there wasn’t anything to worry about, how the eyes of people who do have diabetic retinopathy look “way worse” than mine. She even went so far as to say that without the retinal photography scanner, she probably wouldn’t have even seen the bleeds.

I think that was supposed to make me feel better…

I get that she doesn’t want me to worry and that there probably isn’t anything wrong, and she even said these could definitely heal up all on their own. But still, just the fact that I have more of them is disconcerting, no matter how innocuous they turn out to be. Even if they’re minuscule, more bleeds are more bleeds, right?

And Dr. B wants to see me back in six months. I have always been a once a year girl. Now I’m an every six months girl.