BMJ  2006;333:738-739 (7 October), doi:10.1136/bmj.38975.507188.7C

Practice

The patient's journey: glaucoma

Christine W Hartmann, assistant professor1, Douglas J Rhee, assistant professor2

1 Department of Health Policy, Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, PA 19107, USA, 2 Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Boston, USA

Correspondence to: C W Hartmann cwhrtmnn@aol.com

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

"You have glaucoma," an ophthalmologist informed me when I was 36 (the mean age of onset is 65). Given the uncanny ability of the human brain to compensate for missing visual information, I don't know when I would have noticed my blindness had I not had some unexplained pain in my right eye one morning. As I lay in bed with my hand over my right eye, I looked around the room using only my left eye. I noticed that when I gazed straight ahead at the dresser, I couldn't see part of the closet door. And when I moved my gaze to the closet door, part of the room door disappeared. For the first day, I tried to put it out of my mind, but when the symptoms persisted, I began to get very nervous.

A week later, I sat in the dark examining room, stunned. Tears came to . . . [Full text of this article]


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