Shelly Weinig, 76, New York
Networked his way into great care
I woke up one morning, and I was seeing double. I had three MRIs and they couldn't see anything bad, but I still had double vision. I wore a patch, which helped a little, but I had no depth perception and I couldn't drive. No one could figure out what was going on. It was getting very disturbing. My whole life had turned upside down.
Then I met a friend from my building in the elevator. She asked me about the eye patch I was wearing, and after I made some joke about being a pirate, I told her my problem. She said she had an ophthalmologist friend, Dr. Pamela Gallin, up at Columbia. Dr. Gallin met with me. She sent me to Myles Behrens, who is a genius at diagnosis. I had something rare--the vein and artery behind my eye were so close together that they were joined by capillaries, and the differential pressure was causing those capillaries to swell. You can bleed into the eye. That or the swelling can cut off the blood supply and cause blindness or a stroke.
They fixed the problem, but one of the eye muscles had been damaged and I still had a bit of double vision. I engineered a pair of glasses with a prism to fix that. I still don't have great depth perception, so now I play tennis only with my wife, because she doesn't try to put the ball through my head.
This story appears in the November 8, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
advertisement
