MoyaMoya and Retinopathy

We have been battling Diabetic Retinopathy for a couple years now, with the latest surgery a couple weeks ago.

According to the Doctor, since the eye is not receiving the "standard" amount of blood flow, it believes that more veins are needed.  

Those start growing in the eye, they will bleed at times, causing black spots in your vision, etc, which is how we first found out she had this issue.

This is likely to be caused even MORE by the fact that Moyamoya reduces the amount of bloodflow to the brain.  Diabetes is the primary reason for the retinopathy, but I wanted to put up a post here that if you have Moyamoya AND diabetes, you really need need to have your eyes checked out by an Opthomologist.  

The normal eye doctor that checks your vision does NOT have the tools that can truly diagnose the Retinopathy.  So just consider yourself forewarned!

In our case, we started with the Laser surgeries about a year before knowing Em had the Moyamoya, and another round of them again this year.  Then in September, she had a vitrectomy and is recovering from that now.