So, having completed the procedure to address the Floppy Eyelid and Giant Fornix Syndromes that I had been diagnosed with, I was to now continue the recovery process by applying a commercial eye ointment into the eye, and wait for the bruising to heal and the swelling to subside.<\/p>\n
And the bruising did subside within a short and quite reasonable time.<\/p>\n
Not so the swelling, unfortunately. That persisted over time and through several visits with my eye surgeon, who suggested that over a few months it should subside. That did not occur.<\/p>\n
A few weeks post surgery we returned to the eye drops, and continued regular follow-up visits with the surgeon, but there seemed to be no reduction in the swelling. I should note that there was swelling on both sections of the upper eyelid, as well as on the lower part of the eyelid protruding into the upper cheek area.<\/p>\n
This swelling was affecting my vision as well. Not really significantly, but, for instance, when driving in bright sunlight, I was seeing a reflection of the sun from the lower part of the eyelid, and I found that quite distracting.<\/p>\n
By August – some three months after the surgery – we decided to seek a second opinion and arranged an appointment with a second surgeon. This is where the fun began.<\/p>\n
He took a look at me and asked me what the hell had happened, and so I gave him the full opera, in three part harmony and .. sorry, wrong story.<\/p>\n
He proceeded to take some skin samples for biopsy, one from the upper eyelid, and a second from the lower. These were duly sent away for analysis, and a possible diagnosis of Erdheim-Chester Disease was returned.<\/p>\n
Note that this was a “possible diagnosis”. The lab wasn’t sure, but there were lots of histiocytes, which is one of the primary indicators of ECD. Googling ECD was a relevation, and my presentation was atypical. I had no leg pains, for instance, and the medical advise was that if this was ECD, then it’s possible that it’s localised, and hopefully that’s how it will stay.<\/p>\n
But as I said, that’s where the fun really began. Because of the rarity of ECD, diagnosis is very difficult, and there’s a lot of differential diagnosis that needed to occur, so that we could hopefully eliminate (or perhaps identify) other potential villains in this story.<\/p>\n
So we now begin the pin cushion mode of this story. Blood tests. Lots of blood tests. CT Scan. Bone scan. MRI. Full body scan.<\/p>\n
Life is good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The swelling persisted over several months and through several visits with my eye surgeon, and with no reduction apparent, I then sought to obtain a second opinion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[704,703],"tags":[707,706,720,721,713,722,714,717,723,718,701],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newtricks.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1629"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newtricks.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newtricks.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newtricks.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newtricks.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1629"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.newtricks.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1630,"href":"https:\/\/www.newtricks.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1629\/revisions\/1630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newtricks.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newtricks.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newtricks.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}