Last edited Fri May 30, 2025, 04:59 AM - Edit history (1)
The injections of Avastin definitely helped me, given how wet macular degeneration (from a very rare genetic condition called PXE) in the other eye started before that treatment was available and I quickly went legally blind in that eye.
I received injections in my "good eye" almost monthly from about 2006 to 2011, and I never became legally blind in that eye! There's a few minor distortions which remained, but they're trivial.
For some unknown reason, the choroidal neovascular growth and leakage into my retina stopped in 2011, which was a big emotional and financial relief for me. Insurance wouldn't pay a penny for my shots, since they were deemed "experimental" despite how they worked great.
The manufacturer of Avastin, called Genentech, later modified it specifically for eye injections. That drug was called Lucentis, but my insurance wouldn't help pay for that one either because Lucentis only had FDA approval for AGE-RELATED macular degeneration, not my rare PXE-caused MD. I was in my 30's and 40's when I was going through it, typically surrounded by the very elderly while I sat in the waiting room of my retinologist's office.
The shots aren't bad at all, but some people wrongly assume they're like torture. Small needles injected quickly into the numbed side of the eye. My doctor numbed my eye with a cotton swab covered in anesthetic a few minutes before the shot. A speculum was used to keep the eyelids open during the brief injection, of course.
If you already have blind spots, or areas where the photoreceptors have already perished, the shots won't help you. Anti-VEGF shots only help to maintain the photoreceptors, by averting scar tissue which naturally develops from the bleeds. It's the scar tissue which interferes with the extreme metabolism of the photoreceptors, basically causing them to drown in their own waste. Photoreceptors don't regenerate, unfortunately. Once they're gone, they're gone forever.
The most stressful part of that period of my life was hearing the ophthalmologist constantly complaining that I needed to see him much sooner for the shots, or the scar tissue would destroy my vision. Yet his assistants wouldn't schedule be sooner! They'd moan about having many other patients, so I'd just have to wait a week or two. Rinse, repeat.
The doctor was mostly worried about "covering his own ass", or he would've put a notation in my file to schedule me ASAP like he supposedly demanded. He'd say that I was still working age, so I was a priority over his retired patients. Yet his assistants NEVER got the memo.
So I'd be very anxious as another day would pass with a big distortion in my vision, caused by a new retinal hemorrhage, imagining the development of irreversible scar tissue. (The distortions were like someone pressing on the back of a movie screen.)