Problems with my left eye again....

The date: April 2008

I had been getting a lot of dental work done...I guess too much work done. One night watching TV with Gio I started noticing that my vision in my left eye wasn't the same. I put my hand over my left eye and everything looked perfect through my right eye; then I put my hand over my right eye and my vision through my left eye was horrible. The best I could describe it is felt like I had to fix the picture on the TV, like back in the days when you had to fix the "bunny ears" on the antenna to fix the picture. 

The next day I had to go to work with partial vision no less. I told a cardiologist I work with, Dr. Weiland, what was happening and he examined my eye and told me that I had to go see an ophthalmologist. After seeing the ophthalmologist and going through a series of vision tests she told me in a concerned voice that I had to see a neurologist soon because i was at risk of losing my vision in my left eye due to increased pressure to my optic nerve. Dr. Weiland saved the day for me again the following day when he called me and told me that he was able to get me an appointment with a neurologist. I went there and he told me that due to all the extensive dental work I was having that the pain associated with it put too much stress in my body and the end result was my left optic neuritis. After that consultation I went home with 2 prescriptions: one for prednisone, which is a steroid, and one for ativan, a medicine that would help me sleep. The amount of prednisone which I was to take for the next three days would wreak havoc on my body and could, in the words of my neurologist, "blow you up and you won't be able to sleep". Love the bedside manner: "blow you up". Wow. Those pills saved me from being admitted to the hospital for IV steroids and I was grateful for that but those pills were so hard to swallow because they tasted awful!!!! I had to take 50 pills a day to equal 1000mg of predisone!




Needless to say, they saved my vision and for that I thank God who put people in my path to help me when I needed it most. (Oh yea and I didn't "blow up" nor need the ativan to sleep. )