Sunday, March 21, 2010

Giant Papillary Conjunctivitis

Gracie went for EUA #16 on Friday. Her left (real) eye looks great! No new tumors, no laser treatments required. This is the first time that that eye has not had laser treatments done during an EUA so we're pretty excited about that. Her right eye socket however has giant papillary conjunctivitis. It's an inflammation and pustules on the mucous in her eye socket. It's nothing cancerous or anything, it's just annoying. Usually it's associated with contact lens use and is often called contact lens induced papillary conjunctivitis (or something else with the same idea). It can be caused by protein buildup on the contact that irritates the eye, or a reaction to the solution, or a rough edge on the contact... you get the idea. Well we've noticed the past couple of times Gracie has had her eye cleaned it develops large amounts of goop after. We're talking copious amounts. So much that her prosthesis popped out 10 times in 48 hours due to the drainage around it. So if the eye is dirty it seems fine, after being cleaned it causes all sorts of problems. We're now wondering if there is a solution that is used to clean the eye that perhaps Gracie is reacting to. It doesn't seem that this would be a common problem (can't find much of anything about it in my searches or emails to my RB list serv) if it's what is happening but really it's the only thing we can think of. I'll be getting in touch with the ocularist tomorrow to see what he thinks. The ointment we've been given is definitely helping to resolve the goop issue, but really we'd like to prevent it from happening in the first place. But other than that inconvenience we're thrilled to report that Gracie is doing wonderfully well.

Stephanie