I honestly don't even know where to start this entry. But often, starting is the hardest part, isn't it? I do it a lot as a person. Starting something, doing well, and then just stopping. I'm not sure what exactly happens every time, but there comes a point where I leave something off and then I think, oh, I can't go back to that. Time to start over.
In fact, I've got a half written post about Heidelberg sitting in the drafts section here I totally forgot about, and I never got around to writing about Toulouse either. I'm sure there's a ton of "stuff that only happens in the UAE" posts I've wanted to share and forgotten about. And now, it may be a good long while before I write about Siena.
Siena was lovely. Siena was beautiful, relaxing, serene. Siena was also where all of this started.
The day I was out on a sightseeing tour of the Chianti region by myself, there came a point where I started to feel like I had something in my eye. Figuring I just had an eyelash or something, I washed it out. Everything was fine. Then, the next day, while walking around with Jon who'd finally gotten a break from his experiments, I finally -saw- something in my eye. I told him about it, but it was never more than a minor annoyance. We flew home the next day, on an overnight. The pain in my eye was there again, steady but never intense. I figured I'd have it looked at when we got home. The next day, both being exhausted, we pretty much just slept. I wasn't really concerned with the eye at that time because I knew it would be something I'd get checked out. And I did, the next day.
Well, sort of. Monday, November 16th, I had an orthopedist appointment at 10am. I'd been having some sort of weird sensation loss in my feet, and my GP recommended before I left for Siena that I see the ortho. Pinched nerve, probably. I sent my GP an email that morning about the eye, and she recommended I just see another GP while I was at the hospital so I wouldn't have to go back and forth. I agreed and scheduled an appointment with the GP on that day at Harley Street, where my ortho is. Ortho gave me more muscle cream and patches, said it was probably overwork and stress because I have messed up feet and that if it didn't clear in a few weeks we'd reassess. I filled my scripts and had some time before my next appointment at 1p, so I went to the mall that's right next door.
I should interject here that I had, at this point, done something silly and stubborn. My vision was starting to cloud a little more in my right eye, but I could still see fairly well, so I drove myself to the doctor that morning. I didn't want my husband to have to take me since he had work, and I didn't feel like grabbing a cab, and as I've said about forty times before, this was minor. It wasn't until I was talking to the GP that I really noticed a -blind- spot. She told me she thought I needed to be seen by an ophthalmologist immediately, but she thought it was just a scratch (AGAIN WITH THE SCRATCH), and handed me a referral letter. She also told me not to drive, so I called Jon, updated him on the situation, and then called Cleveland Clinic because I knew they'd just opened a new Eye Institute.
I talked to the appointment people on the phone, explained the situation and that I really needed to be seen today, and then after much back and forth they put a nurse on the phone, so that I'd be sure to get to the right place. She talked to me for a few minutes, and then said "I'm going to give you some advice, and you need to follow it, okay?" and then she told me I needed to come into the ED immediately instead of going to the Eye Clinic. I called Jon, who took a cab to come pick up the car, and I took the cab over to Cleveland.
It took not even five minutes after I walked in to be seen by an ER doctor, who was very kind, and began running all of the tests he knew, examining my eye. After exhausting his options and calling to consult with the ophthalmologist, he convinced them to see me in the eye clinic even though they were done for the day. I went across the hospital to the clinic, where we ran the tests and that's when I got the news that I wouldn't be going home that night after all. Of course by this point, I'd all but lost functional sight in my right eye. I could see things on the periphery, but there was a big white spot where sight should have been.
As another aside, I can't rave enough about my experiences at Cleveland Clinic, and I do well plan on doing that, but not in this post because I want to be able to give each and every person who gave me such excellent care the attention they deserve, and that will just make this too long because I still have too much to say.
The doctor, his nurse, and the imaging tech all came in at once to the room. They told me I might want to call my husband, and that was the first point where I really realized that something was badly wrong here. Besides the near total blindness, which I hadn't actually had the chance to sit down and notice because I'd been so busy and my other eye had kicked into high gear to compensate. They told me that I had a condition called optic neuritis which required hospitalization for treatment, and that they'd be admitting me. After the initial shock, I was in total disbelief. I'd been told once today that this was nothing big, I thought it was minor, and here I was going into the hospital? I hadn't been back from vacation for two days. This was crazy.
He explained that he'd consulted with a neurologist and that they were admitting me, and I just needed to wait for them to have a room ready and they'd get me settled in to the hospital. And then I finally heard it for the first time. "You should know this is often a first symptom in multiple sclerosis."
Um, what? I had a scratch. My eye is going to be fine. I don't have MS. Okay, so my eye is not okay, but that doesn't mean I have MS. I don't even know exactly what MS is. Sure, I'd heard about multiple sclerosis before, and I knew people who had it, but it's not like I was familiar with the disease myself.
I finally got admitted and settled into a room on the 10th floor, the neuro ward, and Jon finally caught up with me. The neuro on call came in to explain that my consulting physician would be in in the morning, but that he'd given the orders to go ahead and start the IV steroid treatment right away, and we'd begin the testing and MRI battery the next day to identify the cause, which was okay, because by this point it was late in the evening and we were in the hospital unexpectedly and I was tired and just wanted to sleep. I had to call my mom and let her know I was in the hospital, so I did, and I and the nurse assured her that I was in good hands and that everything was going to be okay and that there was no need to rush over because it could just be a random ON flair up and that it happened for things other than MS, and that we would all know and feel better after the tests.
So the next day I had my MRIs, and then at about 8 that night, my doctor walked in and told me it was pretty well confirmed by the scans that I did in fact have MS. So much so that he didn't feel the need to do the spinal tap. It was just a complete and total shock.
I'm not ready to put the rest of this experience out there just yet, and this is long enough, so we probably have a good stopping place. I should explain my title: I just recently heard the new Adele song, and love it so much, and thought it fit so well because that's what this whole thing has totally felt like. Calling myself from the outside. I'm not sure if anyone has answered yet or not.
