I promised drama.
I will now deliver DRAMA.

So, on June 10th I was diagnosed with papilledema. For those that don’t want to click and read, that would mean that my optic nerve is swollen, and in my case the swollen nerve is in my right eye. For the last couple of months I have been noticing that the vision is my right eye has been fading in and out of sight and that my vision in that eye (when I had it) was hazy. I thought it would go away… I was wrong. Finally, the five to ten seconds of complete blindness in my right eye (which occurs so often I don’t even bother to count how many times it happens per day) became so overly-annoying that it was decided that I should get it checked out.

I was fairly sure that the eye doctor would be able to just give me some eye drops and I would be on my way. Of course, I was wrong. And I should have known… my life isn’t that easy and my health history isn’t that clean. The doctor looked at me and quite seriously told me that we needed to figure out the cause of the swelling so that the damage caused by the swelling would not be irreversible. (Meaning, this needs to be addressed asap so I don’t permanently go blind in my right eye. I guess I have a fairly large blind-spot in my right eye’s peripheral vision due to the swelling and it’s only going to get bigger until the swelling goes away.) I got an MRI on June 15th and it came back clean. No tumors. No M.S. Yay.

Tomorrow afternoon I get to have a spinal tap (”they” call it a lumbar puncture, but I know it really is a spinal tap).

Apparently this test will tell the doctors many things.
But mark my words. It will tell them nothing that will help me out of this swollen optic nerve situation. My previous health history tells me to expect them to find nothing except some freaky nerve disorder that they can’t cure. I know I’m being pessimistic but if there is one person out there that blames me… I’d really like to hear why.

This has hit me pretty hard if you can’t tell. I am beyond sick of things like this happening to me and I am not happy at the prospect of living a life where every two to three years I will be diagnosed with one more thing that can’t be cured and can’t even be very well treated. (If you are wondering why I would think my life would go that way it is because that is the way it has gone for the last DECADE.) I think I resent this SO much because I was just beginning to feel as if I was moving on with my life despite the RSD. I had finally told the RSD to go to hell and that I was going to live anyway… really live and do the things that I wanted to do despite the everyday/everynight burning pain. And look where the moving on got me. Right back in a doctors office with a bunch of non-answers right in front of my face. Again. But this time there is the added fun of the possibility of going blind in my right eye.

Seriously. Why I’m not screaming right now is beyond me.