Madden Mischief

Before I went to see my eye doctor, I was looking a bit degenerate!  The floaters were busily buzzing across my right eye.  It’s called macular degeneration, but don’t worry my darling, it’s light years from masculine degeneration!

Now Dr. Pooja Garg, my masterful M.D. and a board certified vitreo-retinal surgeon and a native of sunny South Florida, is keeping those floaters at bay. 

Those are the dark little dots, those tiny specs drifting willy-nilly across my vision like spinning Frisbees whisking right by my right eye.

Now thankfully they’re gone, out from my eye like MacBeth’s brief candle.

After completing high school at Pine Crest, my eye-saver hero Dr. Garg received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

She earned her M.D. degree from the University of Miami and now I’m pleased to award her a Madden Master’s Degree plus Honorable Mention in MaddenMischief.

The tribute is for how skillfully she put an end to the floaters playing Frisbee in my right eye.  How does she now keep me so clear-eyed and happily Frisbee free?

She needles me.  Not just the friendly kidding she likes to do when she sees me flopping in her chair in the ophthalmologist offices of S. Daniel Salama MD PA on Palmetto Park Rd.  This is where she practices in Boca Raton when not in her main office in Coconut Creek.

Quick as a flash, painlessly she injects a needle into my right eye once a month, now just once every couple of months. And I take eye vitamins she prescribed.

Whatever it is she inoculates into my eye, it’s working.  The floaters thankfully have floated away and are not returning.  I’m now seeing clearly from both eyes.

They say macular degeneration is age related.  Well now I’m feeling much younger!  And yes, more masculine too. 

I just appreciate, admire and I’m so grateful to my Dr. Garg for undegenerating me.

What a marvelous specialist she is, so warm and friendly.  When she looks into your eyes she cares, unlike a physician who after studying your chart just stares.

I’m so happy her parents moved from India to sunny Florida so she could be such a magnificent macular degeneration conqueror.  Fortunately, she’s officed nearby my beachfront condo where those floaters were playing Frisbee by the sea.   

To them I say as would MacBeth:

Out, out, brief floaters
Play Frisbee someplace other
Then in my eye!
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow
May all macular de-generators
Discretely die.

Now I’ll close by giving you some facts about macular degeneration and how you can help to defeat it.

You’ve heard of Mount Etna, the volcano in Italy.   Well now there are thousands miniature Mount Etna’s erupting across Florida spewing harmful lava on eyes, says Dr. Garg.  A good percentage of them are erupting in the retinas of people aged 60 and over and to the rescue comes Dr. Garg as the eruptions spill lava-like fluid into eyes with damaging results from this unfortunately, so common a malady called macular degeneration.   

Did you know:

• More than 20 million Americans have macular degeneration, myself included.
• Macular degeneration is a leading cause of irreversible blindness.
• One in three Americans over age 75 may have this disease, which if caught in time, as was mine, is treatable. 

You can support Macular Degeneration Research by contributing by check or credit card securely online at brightfocus.org/cure AMD or donate by phone by calling Macular Degeneration Research at 855-345-6637.

Don’t miss Tom (Spin Man) Madden’s next book, his seventh, titled “As America’s Hippest, Is Catholicism Now Coolest?”   When not writing books and blogs, together with his dauntless daughter Adrienne Mazzone, he’s making clients of their PR firm, TransMedia Group, much more visible in the news.  Madden started the firm a few decades ago after he left NBC where he was vice president, assistant to the president, who was then TV programming wunderkind Fred Silverman. TransMedia Group’s first clients were AT&T and The City of New York. Today, the award-winning firm represents clients worldwide