Les Jones

Mom’s Going in for Another Lucentis Treatment

Monday, July 16th, 2007 | Macular Degeneration |

Mom’s going in for another Lucentis injection Monday, because her eye is hemorrhaging again. She’s been dreading it all week. I imagine getting an injection in your eye isn’t pleasant. Too, the last time she had a Lucentis treatment she had another stroke. She’s so nervous her voice has been cracking as she talks all week.

Life hasn’t exactly been fair to my mother. Her mother died when she was nine or so. She was the youngest of a bunch of kids, all born in the hills in a house without electricity. Her father worked for TVA and was gone a lot, and he decided he couldn’t keep her, so he put her up for adoption. She was adopted by a cruel woman who never loved her.

When she met my dad she was only too happy to get married and get away from her mother. World War II ended just as they were getting married. Dad got drafted into the Marines during the Korean War and she made do while he was overseas by waiting tables near Parris Island, South Carolina. After that dad used the GI Bill to go to heating and air conditioning school and they moved back to Maryville, Tennessee, where she worked for a time as a legal secretary in downtown Knoxville and downtown Maryville.

Dad’s relatives lived around Dalton, Georgia. Almost to a one they had gotten into the burgeoning carpet business. His uncle Elbert took the chickens out of his chicken coop and replaced them with rolls of carpet to sell to people passing along I-75. Mom started selling carpet part time to make a little extra money, and dad installed it on the weekends.

(My dad didn’t have the easiest life, either. Born illegitimate back in the days when that meant something, he never knew his father. His mother left Georgia and left him to be raised by a mentally-retarded relative for a time.)

Eventually the part time carpet business took off and dad quit heat and air. They rented a shop on Broadway in Maryville and lived in a little apartment in the back. One day my brother played with matches and set the place on fire. Then they moved the store down the street to its current location. (It’s Dorolee’s Carpet House (short for Dorothy and Leon, in the style of Desilu Studios), at 1900 East Broadway. She sold it when she retired half a dozen years ago.)

Mom worked selling carpet almost forty years six days a week, through four kids, a divorce, and a land swindle in Etowah that cost her much of her savings. Later, she lost more of her savings trying to rescue my sister from her drug addiction. Mom has seen two of her children die before her. One son to a crib death, and one daughter to a drug-related death last year.

My brother and sister both married and divorced without having kids. I finally had my first child at age at nearly age 36. By then macular degeneration had set in for my mother, and she could barely see her first grandchild. Her vision was worse by the time we had our second child. Last night she told me if she could have one wish before she died it would be be to see her grandchildren for just five minutes. That’s got me choked up right now.

So now her one good eye is hemorrhaging again and she’s lost almost all of her sight. Now that there’s leakage behind her eye she qualifies for another Lucentis injection. I didn’t realize it before, but the macular degeneration had taken away all of her color vision. After the last injections her eyesight improved to the point that she could see the orange in a box of cereal, red in a person’s shirt, and a patch of yellow on TV. Once the leakage stops a patient can’t get any more injections, and her color vision soon disappeared. I suspect that in the future the FDA will approve additional injections past that point, but for now that’s the best we can do.

6 Comments to Mom’s Going in for Another Lucentis Treatment

Leave a comment