It turns out the visante OCT scan is more like taking digital pictures of the eyeball but it also shows some depth. Quite painless and quick. We walked back to Dr. Opth’s office in the building next door with printouts of the scans.

The point of this was to try to determine if the bump went below the surface … not a good thing. Fortunately, it appeared to be just a surface bump. However, Dr. Opth is still fairly sure it’s melanoma. He’s so sure that he printed out an article about conjunctival melanoma from Wills Eye in Philadelphia, apparently the nation’s specialists in eye cancers. In addition, he contacted them and said their recommendation is surgery, too.

Dr. Opth tells me he wants to do the surgery soon … in the next couple of weeks. He also wants to perform the normal follow-up procedures during the surgery since he has such a strong belief in the fact that it’s melanoma. This entails cryotherapy (freezing) and a pure alcohol wash or rub or something. It was getting hard to follow everything at this point!

I have to admit that my finances are taking up more of my thoughts than the melanoma at this point. Sounds weird but you have to know that I’ve only had maybe one cold in the last ten years. My good health and optimistic outlook resulted in a health insurance policy with a $5,000 deductible. Yeah, $5,000! Plus, when you factor in that I’m self-employed and being unable to work means no income, it’s definitely going to leap to the forefront of my thoughts.

Dr. Opth’s assistant and I were working on scheduling the surgery. Between my work schedule and the availability of surgical facilities, we were looking at about 3 weeks out. However, Dr. Opth overhears this and says no, he wants this done within 2 weeks. Okay, fine. My surgery is scheduled for 7:15am on 10/6/08.

Finally got into the opthamologist’s office. We’ll call him “Dr. Opth.”

He puts about 4 different drops in my eyes, looks at them through all those machines, and then calls his partner in to take a look. Then he goes back to staring at my eyes through the machines. This is a guy who doesn’t like to say anything until HE’S ready.

He’s asking a few questions but when he gets to “is there a history of rare cancers in your family” I know this isn’t going to turn out to be just a good ol’ dry eye problem.

When he finally finishes checking out my eyes, he tells me that there are a couple of possibilities. However, Dr. Opth feels fairly strongly that my “bump” is melanoma. He sees a little brown spot in the bump that’s like a small freckle and that’s common with melanoma. However, we can’t be sure what it is until we do a biopsy, which requires surgical removal of the bump.

Frankly, I got lucky. It seems that Dr. Opth has actually had a couple of eyeball melanoma cases before and, since it’s quite rare, this is unusual. But at least he knows what it looks like.

We scheduled a visante OCT scan to give him more information about the bump.