When I was in Seattle, as I had been just three months before my diagnosis and for 6 years prior, I had had a strange occurrence with my vision. This occurred maybe 3 years before I returned to Boston. I had been at work, at my job for the YWCA, just sitting at my basement desk reviewing resume drafts of the women in my “Interviewing Skills“ workshop, when suddenly I got extremely dizzy and my vision blurred. Not blurred to the point where I couldn’t see at all, but blurred to an extreme that I had never experienced before. I could no longer read the resume I was looking at. I could see the page, see that there were words on it, but I couldn’t focus on the words for long enough to read across a sentence. As a began to try to focus on various objects around the room – job fair posters, bulletin boards – to test my vision at different distances and with different objects, I noticed that objects to the right side of me were far harder to read than objects to my left. I closed my right eye. Things were clear. I opened my right eye and closed my left, and I wash awash with a feeling of nausea and panic. I couldn’t see a thing. There was light but it was clouded like looking through gauze. I started to sweat and really thought that I might throw up. I stood up and the vertigo was so intense that I had to grasp the desk. After a few moments I was able to walk enough to go to my boss, tell her that I was feeling very sick and was going home. She was painting her nails so couldn’t question my early departure. I took the bus home as usual and spent the entire ride opening and closing my left eye. I’m sure that didn’t help the nausea and dizziness, but I was so overcome with the extent of this impairment and the sudden onset, that I couldn’t help but keep checking. I figured it might go away just as suddenly as it had arrived. It didn’t.
I called in sick the following day and saw an optometrist at a Seattle hospital. Working at the Y paid dirt, but it did have excellent health care coverage. The doctor did the usual battery of eye exams – hold this there, close that, read this, open that, look at this, look over there. He repeatedly asked me to take on and off my glasses. At one point he asked me to close my left eye and read the alphabet chart as far down as I could. “I can’t. I don’t see any letters.” So he said, “Now put your glasses on.” “They are on,” I said. And he looked up from his chart such that I knew he saw the problem now.
That finally prompted a much more serious battery of test to my eyes and vision, beyond the standard prescription-glasses variety. The most interesting of these test was the last and longest. A very big contraption that I set my head into. I could rest my chin on a platform and could use only one eye at a time to look through a hole into what, from my limited perspective looked like the inside of a small satellite dish. There was a black dot right in the center and I was told to look straight at that black spot with the one eye throughout the whole test. I was given a hand-held buzzer, Jeopardy style. It was all game like in fact. The instructions were to press the button every time I saw a speck of light come into my field of vision. “Don’t look toward the light. Still look at the dot, but when you see the light press the buzzer.” The light was demonstrated first, for my reference. It took a definite conscious effort not to look at the light when it flashed, but I could understand how this would test my “field of vision” and tried my best to follow the directions. It was a vary small speck, but when they started flashing the light, the dish was darkened, so it was easier to see and a planetarium feel came over the test.
The test was done first with me looking through the hole with my left eye. It seemed to last for about 10 minutes, probably not that long. But by the end you just see or imagine that darned little light flashing everywhere. Isn’t that actually a Chinese torture strategy? What was fun at first, was intolerable by the end and I was just pressing the button in a nervous tick way, possibly still related to light speck sightings, possibly not.. And then you switch eyes.
The left eye seemed easier, only because there seemed to be fewer flashes. Then it occurred to me that there were probably just as many flashes but I couldn’t see them, I was simultaneously glad to have fewer tiny strobes pestering me and concerned that I couldn’t see. Towards the end of the test on my right eye, the doctor started verbally questioning me about the light. He would say “Do you see it now? Do you see it now? Do you see it now?” “No. No. No.” I don’t see it for Christ sake. Then, all of a sudden, there would be a big squiggle of light around the dish and I would lamely push the buzzer. Now those ones seemed too obvious and they annoyed me. It felt like he was throwing me a bone. I didn’t want to be humored in his twisted video-game. He hadn’t done that for the other eye.
At least he was a get to the point doctor. It took only a few minutes for him to print out the results and he clipped a print-out to the light board in his office. It was a grey shape like a piece of cake or cheese that looked like it had been created in pointillism. “This is your field of vision in your left eye. It should be a circle.” I could see the problem.
I had Optic Neuritis, which I was told would last for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. My vision would gradually improve over that time back to normal, or almost normal. Sometimes some blurriness remained. The doctor mentioned that in some cases this is an early warning sign of lupus, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, or leukemia. “My mother has MS.” “Hmm.” he said.
I left his office and started again opening and closing my right eye, now checking for gradual improvement. I went and got some lunch.
