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Diabetic Eyes: Something you Don’t Know

My husband had an appointment with an eye specialist because of his diabetes. Many diabetics have something called Diabetic Retinopathy. After you’ve had high blood sugar for some time, you can experience eye changes, including leaking blood vessels and new blood vessel growth, that can be big trouble for your eyes.

Fortunately, doctors can now do surgery and prevent vision loss, but without it, diabetes can still lead to blindness. We’re lucky; my husband doesn’t need surgery because his diabetes was caught before his eyes progressed to that point.

When we were talking with his doctor, we learned something interesting. After being diagnosed with diabetes and (presumably) getting your blood sugar near normal ranges, you can expect your eyes to worsen for the next nine months.

Yes, that’s what his retinal specialist told us. For nine months after the blood sugar starts coming down, the eyes tend to get worse. After that, you see drastic improvements in the eye with continued blood sugar control. I wish we had known that up front; it would have saved a week of worry while waiting for the appointment with the specialist. He told us that it’s not really known why that’s so, but that it does tend to work that way.

He also emphasized that it’s very important to get blood sugar down into a normal range and keep it consistently there. That’s the only thing that will help your eyes over the long term.

We learned some other good bits of information.

1. You don’t have to have any vision changes to have diabetic retinopathy.
2. You can have diabetes and have none of the usual symptoms.
3. Routine blood work can miss diabetes. Diabetes is often undiagnosed for years, and that’s years that the disease can damage your eyes, kidneys and other organs!

Talk to your doctor about getting your blood sugar tested, even if you have no symptoms or family history. If you DO have symptoms or a family history, you need to get tested sooner rather than later!
If you have a real aversion to drinking the glucose for the fasting test, ask your doctor to do an A1C instead. You just give some blood, and you don’t even have to fast or drink anything! You can’t tell me that’s not easy enough to do.