Never Say Never

I apologize for not having written anything in nearly a week. It was a busy weekend, and the motivation left me for a  few days since since then.

At any rate, as doctors, we sometimes tote a certain complication or disease as being rare. And for those of us who are young doctors, the rare things may never have been seen. Yet.

In this amazing field of medicine, there are ever changing treatments available for different things. Age related macular degeneration (ARMD) is a common eye disease of elderly people. Treatment for it has been mostly lacking and disappointing. But when the disease becomes "leaky" or bleeds, we can at least give an injection into the eye. It's with a medication which binds and clears blood vessel growth factors, the root of the problem. We always tell the patients that in the process of doing this, there is a rare complication of getting an infection in the eye: endophthalmitis.

I have always told people that it is very rare, and I had never seen a case related to injections. That all changed recently. Sure enough, a patient came into the VA ED with a painful eye one week after an injection, and was found to have an infection.

Start counting. I can now say, "Well I've only seen it happen once."