Saturday, July 21, 2007

Please have your eyes checked

In February of 2007, we found out that my husband had cancer in one of his eyes. It was melanoma. There were no symptoms only a blind spot in his side vision that he found when he was out back shooting BB guns with our 2 boys.

We had 2 choices, go to Philladelphia and have radiation placed in his eye and loose his sight, and the eye, in a few years or just go ahead and remove the eye. He chose to have it removed. He now has a fake eye that is very hard to tell is fake.

I'm not going to say we had an easy time going through this because we didn't. Your first response when you hear that your loved one has cancer is total fear. "What if I loose my husband?" That was the first thought that went through my mind when I heard it.

Once the eye was removed, we found out that they got all of the cancer when they removed the eye and his chances of ever getting cancer again is 1 to 2 percent each year, and it's an accumulative percentage, meaning that in 25 years, he'll have a 25 to 50 percent chance of getting cancer again. So the odds are great for him.

I thank God that he went to the doctors when he did. As I stated above, there were no warnings that it was even there and with it being in his side vision, it was very hard to see unless he was only using one eye as in the case of shooting guns with the boys.

Please, if you don't have regular eye exams, do so. You never know what might be there. We didn't.