So here we’ll pick up the thread after the unfortunate Friday the 13th.  A warning for the squeamish: this is a dark day, even more so than yesterday; and the worst of all is yet to come before light finally starts filtering through. So if you’re one of those squeamish types who closes their eyes in the scary parts of a horror film, feel free to turn the page and wait for a sunnier episode.

Also, as a spoiler alert of sorts: at the nadir of this experience I considered ending the blog here.  With only nine slow, wobbly miles to show for the first five weeks, it has evolved into more of a medical crisis tale than a biking one, and is arguably misplaced here.  I thought maybe instead I’d open up a new, longer journal that’s more or less abridged history of the full Team Anderson life story, something Rachael could read to me episode at a time as bedtime stories in years to come if it comes to that.  A pretty maudlin thought of course, but I’m not feeling this any longer as I set this down four days later.  I’m hopeful now that we’ll finally break into the double figures with the bike sooner than later, so we’ll hold out hope for now and keep plugging on.  And we’ll watch that comment box as a clue to who’s tough enough to take the hard stuff.

My day begins early and very badly, not long past midnight.  I wake up to go to the bathroom and instantly realize my bad right eye has gotten much worse in the last few hours so that perhaps two thirds of my field of vision has now clouded over with a darker, less penetrable shade of grey.  I can still see a clear, raggedly edged narrow window in the center through the glass, but darkly.  And then I realize that my ‘good’ eye has gotten blurrier too. My overall vision using both eyes is misleading, being better than either eye alone because it’s learning to optimize from the best information available.  The brain is so unbelieveable,

Maybe it’s a negative reaction to those eyedrops?  I read the active ingredient on the label (after taking a photo with the iPad  so I can enlarge it enough to read it).  I browse for negative reactions but there’s nothing like that indicated so I fitfully go back to sleep.

Four hours later I’m awake again.  It’s worsened still, and two things happen within minutes of each other.  One - the headache I’ve suffered from for over a month is suddenly, totally gone (and has yet to come back five days later, even weakly).  Other than the vision loss  and anxiety, I feel completely normal

And the second thing happens - in a flash of insight through the gloom, I finally connect the dots. That first blinding headache from a month ago, and the vision loss.  It probably was never a sinus and eye infection at all.  Maybe it was a stroke.  I pull up the iPad and quickly learn of eye stroke, a rare disease that affects 1 or 2 poor folks per 100,000 per year.  I’ve seemingly lost the health lottery.  Several articles tell the same dreadful story - like any stroke, it’s a medical emergency, and time is of the essence.  

As soon as it’s light enough to drive we head to Friends Hospital, the regional facility that’s fortuitously only an easy half mile away.  Rachael drives, slowly and with difficulty because she’s so out of practice, and I do my best to navigate from a phone map and street signs I can barely read.  And the poor Raven suffers its third fender scrape when Rocky clips the unharmed angle iron bracketing the garage door as sh’s baking out of our garage  (Elizabeth scored the first one backing out the fiendishly too narrow parking space of her condo and I took the second hit against an unseen post backing out of a slot in the grocery store parking lot in Tucson last winter).  The poor Raven is starting to look less sleek and considerably more like an old junkyard Covid.  Never more, he rasps angrily as we drive up the alley.

At the ER I’m admitted almost immediately even though the small waiting room is half full of fellow sufferers and their partners.  Over the next half hour I am administered several standard eye exams testing visual acuity and then looking for retinal damage, glaucoma, and the like - and then I’m wheeled off to imaging for two CT scans of my head: one with and one without contrast.  Nothing is found in the visual exam, but I fail the acuity test when the right eye can hardly make out the rectangle of the snelling chart on the wall maybe twenty feet down the hall.  The left eye scarcely does better and is unable to do more than guess at the single large letter at the top of the chart.

And then about ten minutes later I’m sitting in front of a real, excellent doctor - a young Asian woman full of penetrating and surprising questions.  For example: do you have trouble chewing or opening your mouth, she asks?  Yes, back behind the teeth. on both sides of the mouth.  the pain built gradually from opening it as I chewed my small breakfast this morning, becoming bad  enough that I finally had to throw away half my bowl of granola because it got progressively more painful with every bite.  I assumed it was due to one of several of what now look like apparent red herrings in this saga, my four trips to the dentist last month.  Nope, probably not.  Strangely enough, this specific mouth pain is a characteristic symptom of one of the two most probable causes of this condition.

She listens attentively and takes notes as she guides me rhrough my complete episodic history of the last five weeks, all the way to my cold symptoms that began just before leaving Spain and my behavior on the flight.  Did I walk around much?  And for not the last time in this tale Rachael and I see this instantly clouded facial expression cross her face.  Her eyes almost cross when she hears that both the Urgent Care doctor and the optometrist sent me home with eyedrops after having no answers for my symptoms.  She took down both of their names in her notes.

And then she delivers her opinion.  Two causes are the prime suspects.  One is an eye stroke.  No evidence showed up on the CT scans, but that’s not surprising because the clots that get lodged in the vessels of the eyes can often be so tiny that they would require an MRI to detect.  The other possible cause is a temporal arteritis, a rare autoimmune disease of the circulatory system that can also affect the eyesight and also lead to permanent blindness as well as damage throughout the body as it moves through the system.  There’s an important difference though - the latter condition is sometimes treatable by steroids if caught early enough and can sometimes reverse the damage and even result in complete restoration of sight.  so there’s hope for a Christmas miracle in this dark tale yet.

She tells me it’s essential that I get to an ophthalmologist ASAP, and we’re in luck - during the interview her colleague has been busily researching and manages to find exactly one in the region who’s briefly in his office this Saturday afternoon, and he can see me at 12:30 if we can get there.  It’s 30 miles away at the Shephard Eye Center in Santa Maria.  We have two hours.  It’s a drive straight south into a bright sun, I’m and the wheel, and they’re some of the hardest driving miles of my life.  I often ask Rachael to tell me the remaining distance and I nearly have to pull off with less than ten miles to go because of the eye strain that worsens with every mile; but we get there on time, and we even have time to stop at the neighboring Starbucks for a quick snack while we wait a half hour for our appointment.

We’re greeted by the ophthalmologist in the parking lot, and he briskly walks us to his office.  Everything is aclutter, he pauses to give direction to a worker as we pass, and it looks like he’s really only down here this afternoon to oversee a remodeling project or the like.  We’re lucky he’s available at all today.  He has his own set of examinations to perform, as well as similar ones to those the optometrist performed yesterday but also he applies iodine eyedrops  so he can see back to the optic nerves and sees there’s evidence of swelling in both of them.

He concurs that eye stroke is a possibility as well as the temporal artery thing; and it’s even potentially a brain stroke, though none of my other symptoms suggest that.  He’s frank, direct, not unkind, but suggests that our best hope is for the one that responds to steroids.  He sends us out with a prescription for an oral steroid - one of those fairly low dose five day progressive blister packs - five the first day, four the next, and so on until done.  He says to wait for a call from their office Monday morning to discuss my situation and next steps, and walks us out to the car.

It’s not an easy drive getting back either, but easier because we’re northbound and the sky is now overcast, and he’s given me a plastic sunglasses insert so the glare is much less.  It wasn’t the plan to have me at the wheel though.  We had intended for Rachael to drive back in case my eyes had been dilated, but in our haste she hadn’t thought to grab her own glasses on the way out the door to the ER.  Her astigmatism is bad enough that she really can’t drive the highway without her glasses, especially as out of practice as she is.  So it’s been a tough, discouraging, frightening day from top to bottom.  One picture will suffice.

Heart

6

Comment

3

Link

Kelly IniguezWe need a heart button here - or hugs, or both!
Reply to this comment
2 days ago

Andrea BrownWhat Kelly said. I don't want to "like" this but I'm feeling the feels here.
Reply to this comment
2 days ago

Patrick O'HaraOh man.....I'd personally rather see you on a bike than a hospital bed. Hang in there.
Reply to this comment
1 day ago

Log in to comment or reply

After we ‘re both back in SLO we head down to an Italian restaurant near the CVS outlet, which unfortunately is closed for the day.  It’s a nice, upscale white tablecloth place, and the meals are fine enough - we split an arugula salad and then also split two mains, both quite rich - spaghetti carbonara and butternut squash ravioli.  Plus a nice Italian amber.  It was really over our normal price range though and not quite worth it to us.  My fault - we should have looked at the online menu more closely, but our minds were occupied with other concerns.