[Ghoulish Delight]

The wonders never cease.

For all the malpractice, Vioxx-like disasters, and wildly speculative/inaccurate information disseminated by main stream media, modern medicine's been getting a bad rap recently. But every once in a while, you're reminded of just how far things have come and continue to come.

If my dad had gone through what he's been through over the past 8 months even 5 years ago, he would almost certainly be blind (at best) by now. Untreated diabetes (leading to macular degeneration), near-fatal cellulitis, and a stroke in the vision region of his brain left the future blurry, so to speak. This for a man whose greatest passions are reading, writing, and photography. Doctors were giving him pretty long odds to even stop further deterioration.

But, back from his latest checkup, he's actually seen improvement in both eyes thanks not only to laser treatment, but experimental injections for the macular degeneration. And now that it's been over 6 months since the stroke, he's been cleared to begin further treatments with another injection that has shown even more promising results in correcting degeneration than the one he's already been getting (stroke risk is one of its side effects, so they didn't want to increase that risk until they were sure things were stable).

He's not exactly going to be taking up a career writing names on grains of rice any time soon, or even driving. But this improvement, and opportunity for further improvement, has been far more than any of us could have hoped for and will allow him to do far more of what he had planned with his retirement (namely, continue to write and edit text books, and travel as much as he can).

As you can tell, I'm much relieved to hear this latest news.