We had a follow-up for Mia’s Uveitis this morning. She has been on the steroid eye drop 3 times a day for the past week, and we are still tapering her off very slowly. We are still dilating her eye 3 times a day , and she has been on her eye pressure lowering drops twice a day. At the follow-up today, we learned that she has an early cataract developing in her left eye (the uveitis eye) and her pressure is still higher than it should be. We now need to increase one of her pressure lowering drops to 3x/day. The cataract might be a side effect of the steroid eye drops, or due to the inflammation from the uveitis that we’ve been fighting for over a year now. We are hoping that it doesn’t continue to worsen and affect her vision further. We now need to increase eye patching of her good eye to 4 hours a day, instead of 2. We will continue to taper down on her eye drops and hope that her cataract doesn’t worsen. We are also continuing her oral Methotrexate and hope that will keep the uveitis at bay all by itself once we are off the eye drops. If the cataract gets worse and affects her vision, it’s a possibility that cataract surgery will be needed in the future, but for now, we don’t need to worry about that. I hope in the near future, the cataract treating eye drops are in clinical use and are an option for her if it comes to that. They still need to complete live human trials, but they seem to work well for dogs and for human lenses in the lab.
This is not the news I was hoping to hear today, but we are fortunate that she didn’t have any sign of inflammation in her eye, and no cells present, and no flare. I just wish she didn’t have the added problem of developing a cataract. 🙁