Unexpected Phone Call

I get phone calls to my cell fairly regularly that I don’t answer.   Unrecognized numbers tend to be things like “an important message about your credit card” otherwise known as phishing in the hopes I’ll be foolish enough to not realize they have nothing at all to do with my credit card company.   Sometimes they’re political calls or offers for some medical something or other that I can’t live without.   In short, if I don’t know who you are, I’m probably not going to answer the call.

So when I got a call from, “Unknown Number” you can be sure I don’t answer the call yesterday.   I didn’t even check my phone later in the day to see if there were any voicemails.   Today my son went off to camp and my daughter went to school.   My husband and I went to a mandatory real estate commission continuing education class.    When we got out of class I looked and saw I had a voicemail from that unknown number—and it was Dr. Trese.

I just sort of stared at the phone.  The unknown number makes sense.   Doctors many times need to keep their personal contact information, just that, personal.  Not all patients have the respect to not contact the doctor for, “this little thing that might be worrisome and I’m scared it’s an emergency and can you help me right now?”

So I understand why the call came in from a blocked number.   What surprised me is that Dr. Trese was calling me at all.   We had an email chain, something that also surprised me that the other doctors included his personal email in the email chain about what to do for my daughter’s eye situation.  Dr. Trese had called to talk to me about the best way he though to proceed and he’d try me back.  He’d been international the week prior and was about to leave to go to another international meeting.   I emailed him back and said I was available and would look for his call.

He called me within the hour.   We talked about doing the eye surgery in two steps or one.   The thought had been to have him do the vitrectomy and then have his colleague at Duke do the implant to control the pressure after that surgery.   He said he thought it made the most sense to have only one anesthesia event for my daughter and that he thought Dr. Freedman at Duke could have her colleague, Dr. Toth, do the vitrectomy and then she could implant the Argus 2 pressure device at the same time.

We talked about multiple things, all of which he made me feel comfortable that this was the best way to proceed.   He told me about where he’d just been on his last trip: the Argo meeting which is the largest scientific eye meeting in the world.   He had done a special session on regenerative medicine, something he’s been working on and is looking to raise money to continue the research and start a trial.

In the meeting of close to 250 attendees, he asked if anyone else was working on the same thing.   One person raised her hand.   He spoke with the doctor from MIT who was working with a gentleman who’s done over a hundred startups.   Their work is along similar lines and he is hopeful that they may be able to collaborate and this could also help fund his research efforts.

Why is this important?  Because the regenerative medicine he’s working on would be something my daughter’s eyes may benefit from.   He said if we can reduce the pressure in her eye and preserve the central area of her retina so it continues to function, in two to three years when he’s hoping to begin trials it would be something that could help my daughter’s eye retain or maybe even regain a small amount of vision.

And because of that, he believed doing the surgery for to add the appliance to her eye was the best chance she had to retain and maybe eventually regain some vision.  Are there risks, especially given the poor vasculation in my daughter’s eye?  He didn’t think it was that much of a risk.

I hung up and immediately sent an email to the group chain of our eye doctor heroes if you will, stating we’re at their disposal for scheduling and ready to proceed based on Dr. Trese’s recommendation.   So that’s the latest.   There is still scheduling and the scary thought of how this will change my daughter’s vision and how she will handle things emotionally.   But we have to do this.   I don’t think we have any other choice.   Because the only other choice is guaranteed total blindness.

The Big Boy Update:  My son happily went off to a three-day camping trip in the large state park across from our neighborhood today.   He’s going to have lots of fun with his class and school friends.   He will, undoubtedly come back a complete mess with muddy, sandy and dirty clothes just like last year.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter talked her father into making cookies after school today.   They made some delicious chocolate chip cookies.   She loves cooking with her father.