Should have gone to Specsavers

Should have gone to Specsavers

A week after being diagnosed, I started my new job at Tui UK as a Senior After Travel Advisor. Working on computers all day long, reading documents, learning new programs really started to take a toll on my eyesight and I started to get some migraines, headaches and symptoms that my AVM was playing up. I thought maybe all of this overload of new information and fulltime work was just that I was overdue for an eye test, so off to Specsavers I went.

I hadn't had an eye exam for nearly three years and was actually going to go now I had reached …. Err 40 as my Dad had glaucoma at a young age and both his sisters and his Mum both had it too. It also meant that I would get a free I test. I told the optician the glaucoma history of my family and my recent AVM diagnosis. My test was what she had expected for a person of my age and it had slightly changed since my last visit. In saying this she said my eyes were very healthy, there was no sign of glaucoma, scaring or problems at all on the backs of the eyes. She was very pleased. So was I, something was going right for a change. She did say that my eye muscles were a little bit lazy though (just like the rest of me, I hear my Mum say lol) and that my new prescription I would need varifocals.  Whoops… there it is!!! You've hit 40 Em, wearing varifocals now just need a nice chain on the end of your glasses to hang around your neck and you've slid into middle age!!

Anyway after that the nice optician lady said she wanted to do one last check to test my peripheral vision and asked me to go with one of her colleagues. I sat in front of this machine with my right eye looking into it, I had to look directly at a black dot on the screen and when I saw something out of the corner of my vision click a button on the keypad I was holding, Sure…..No problem. “So let’s do it with your left now” the women said. So we switched over. It seemed like ages before this one started, I thought the women had forgot to start the program. The women said “Did you not see those this time?” I said to her” I thought you hadn't started it, I see them now” I could see some out of the left corner of my eye. The women looked confused and said she was going to start it from the beginning again. Well the same thing happened. I thought there was something wrong with the program, the women said she was just going to pass the results on to the optician. When the optician came back she explained “There was a problem” it wasn't the machine it was me. “You have a problem with you peripheral vision, it’s not your eyes as we looked at those earlier. I think its probably to do with your AVM and how your brain communicates what you see. So I'm going to write to the Eye Specialists at the hospital and let your GP know too”

Here we go again “WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU NOW?”