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Paresh posted an excellent message about dealing with glaucoma in the FitEyes.com forums. He asked seven great questions. I decided to do my best to respond to each question. I'm going to take them one at a time. Paresh's first question was , "what we can do in daily life to limit further damage to eyes?" This blog post is my first response.
Today the following email arrived in my inbox via a post to a glaucoma support group. This email gives me an opportunity to answer some questions, including the original of the name of my (former) blog, The IOP Querent.
David: Greetings!
I read your very interesting blog this morning.
Here are a couple of questions:
What exactly is your background? Your blog says that you are the
director of a research organization. Are you a physician?
Biochemist, etc?
I've written several articles about the very clear relationship between my eye pressure and my stress levels. As I pointed out (in the comments to that article), the standard medical opinion is that stress does not affect eye pressure (intraocular pressure).
This is my plan for overcoming glaucoma: embrace, evolve and exceed.
I had to start embracing my glaucoma because to do otherwise implied aversion. Aversion is defined as "antipathy: a feeling of intense dislike." Obviously, we resist that which we dislike. And that which we resist persists - this is a law of health. This law is the basis for the radical acceptance paradox: radical acceptance is the first step toward change.
In my first true 24-hour eye pressure monitoring period (back in 2007), where supine eye pressure measurements were taken, I found out that my eye pressure is much higher at night than expected. I also found out that my blood pressure is much lower. That's a bad combination of pressures for the health of the optic nerve.
A little more than 60 days ago, I wrote a blog post and asked, "Does Stress Increase My Eye Pressure?" At that time I looked back and noted that my intraocular pressure had increased as my business situation had gotten more stressful. Since then, we have collected a lot more data. I think it will prove interesting to compare two similar days and see what we can learn about stress and eye pressure given the additional data.
Today I compared several eye pressure measurements on the basis of a normal measurement vs. a measurement after 1-2 minutes of relaxed breathing. I wanted to see if my eye pressure is lower when I do simple deep breathing as a form of relaxation.
Today's Lesson: It requires both medication and lifestyle to fully control my IOP. Either one alone is not enough right now. This is the middle way. I would like to control my IOP without medication (or even without Timoptic), but attempting that right now would be too extreme. (I have a tendency to go to the extreme, and that's most likely a subtle personality factor underlying my glaucoma.)
Today was not a typical day! For one thing, we took 200 IOP measurements today! For another thing, my IOP values were not well controlled. It was like my emotions were directly connected to my IOP today, and my emotions were varied. Consequently, today's data shows a large range from the maximum value to the minimum value. That range is 16.7, way above yesterday's value of 11 (which itself was above previous values of 9-10).
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