I Was a Predhead

This scene from episode 2 of The Penguin TV series depicts a “drophead” getting his fix.

That was me 25 years ago, dosing up my left eye, during the early months of recovery from my hellish eye surgeries for a detached retina. The first surgery, by a hack specialist in Worcester, MA, was a failure. The second procedure, by a world-class retinologist at Boston’s Mass Eye & Ear Infirmary, was successful.

Prednisolone, or Pred-Forte, is an anti-inflammatory steroid eye drop. I was on the stuff for such a long time that I became a Pred addict. Between doses my eye began to feel “unsettled.” As soon as I took the drops as prescribed it quieted down, but as with all addictions, the need grew in both intensity and frequency.

My doctor asked, “How are you doing, tapering off of Pred?” I’d tell him it was slow going, and he was willing to prescribe a couple of extra refills. The fact was, my eye felt like it was going to crawl out of my skull. Seriously, this was a real problem for me.

Instead of tapering, I was holding to the original schedule, and even using in between. I’d be at work and have to run to the men’s room to do my drops, like the guy does in the video. “Oh, yeah… that’s the stuff!”

The low point was when I lifted a couple of Pred sample bottles from the doctor’s exam room. I knew he wouldn’t refill the prescription again, so I used those to finally taper down and get off of the stuff.

I was effectively blind in my eye through all of that. Two-and-a-half years later, after cataract replacement surgery, my vision was restored.

Years later, I had an appointment with a Boston ophthalmologist I hadn’t seen before. She looked through my history, paused, turned around, and said, “Oh. You’re THAT Mr. Pratt!” “Uh… what does that mean?” I asked. “You were fully detached for ten days, and now you have perfect visual acuity in that eye. That does not happen!”