Listening: PJ Harvey sample list
Mentally Replaying: the last week +
I'd rather be: out drinking with friends
Desiring: a backrub
Enjoying: gimpy but able eyes


(Preamble, holy shit it's November. I was barely getting used to September and suddently it's cold, dark and November . What?!?)

Ok so. If you don't know what Iritis is you should go look it up. It'll make the rest of this less confusing, I think.


I've had 20/20 vision all of my life. At times it's seemed to put me in the minority as I've constantly been around people who need some kind of help to see whereas I forget and assume anyone can bound out of bed and read the morning paper.


Last spring on a Friday I had a weird situation where I went out at lunch for a walk. I stepped out of the shade and suddenly my left hurt like it was being poked from the back. It's the sort of sensation that you might get in both eyes the first time you step out into the sunlight in the morning. I'm mostly used to it and it takes a couple of seconds to adjust. But this time it was weird, it was acute and it was only in my left eye.

But it did fade after a short time and I ignored it for a while. A few hours later I went to the bathroom and noticed it was *WAY* bloodshot. At the time I worked sitting next to a window. The light was making me crazy for the rest of the day and I had to work with my sunglasses on, occasionally cupping a hand around my left eye to block out as much light as possible.

From anecdotes I knew there wasn't much to be done for a burst blood vessel and even when I had dinner that night with my mom we concurred that there likely wasn't much to be done for it if it didn't actually affect my vision or cause me to start bleeding (from my eye).

(My mom is fairly worry-ish, if she could think of a reason to panic she would have.)

The next morning, though, I barely picked my head up off the pillow when the morning light reached in and made me feel like I was being stabbed in the eye. I immediately set about getting to the urgent care office, which is sort of emergency care within the same medical group as my GP, rather than the extreme step of going to the emergency room. The pain from opening my left eye was so extreme I did everything to keep it closed and/or covered and asked my boyfriend to come over and help me out. Though I did everything right away it still took up most of the day to get into see a physician.

He was an interesting guy. Clearly Russian, he hemmed and hawwed in a really fascinating accent. He wouldn't give me an absolutely certain prognosis but explained that it was one of two possible maladies. One of which is treated with antibiotics - which wouldn't harm the eyes if mis-prescribed; the other of which is treated with steroids which can obviously fuck with the body and eyes if mis-applied. He had to basically toss a coin and he opted for the safer option of antibiotics. He told me to make sure to continue seeing urgent care if it got worse, and possibly make an appointment an opthalmologist if it didn't get better in a few days.

The next day my vision was much worse and the pain was still very sharp, whether in sunlight or under incandescent lights. I went to a different urgent care office and saw a much more certain doctor-type (American). He was dead sure it was conjunctivitis (pink eye) and prescribed an ointment I had to apply directly to my eye. It wasn't what I remembered of pink eye from childhood, but what the heck.

Fast forward through three days of glopping small dollups of goo under my lower eyelid so it would smear over the eye and just sucking up the pain as it dried out my eye and generally didn't help. Vision got steadily worse, pain stayed considerable. Began to worry, close friends began to really worry (boyfriend really, really worried).

finally hit a patch where I was frustrated and the boy pretty much told me it was time to go back to the doctor. So first thing on the fourth morning we hit the road to the medical office and I call to tell them I'm coming in with a goopy, painful, blind eye. At this point there is a film covering my eye that makes it look like it's changed from brown to a bluish-grey. You know the old Lovecraft or Poe stories of the crazy man with the sightless rheumy eyes? That was me, but only in one eye. And I really couldn't see out of that eye. I could barely tell light from dark and couldn't tell you where the carpet ended and the light began. If you held your hand in front of my eye I couldn't see it unless you waved it around really hard.

On the phone the doctors just directed me to an opthalmologist and told me not to bother coming into the medical office, but just go to the OP's office. We did and enter Dr Takeda. He cracks me up. He has *no* sense of bedside manner.

He sat down in front of me, looked into my eye, sat back and said, "Well, damn." Right away he told me it wasn't conjuctivitis. Iritis is an inflammation. Protein fibers gather over and around the iris and do... well all that they do.

Of course it was a little annoying to lose nearly a week to the wrong treatment but he got me started on an aggressive steroid treatment of multiple drops an hour of prednisolone and oral methylprednisolone.

"Drmatic" is probably the word for it as my vision cleared up in about four days and I got right back to work after a week off. The light sensitivity went away first which was a blessed thing. The color of my eye went back to normal, slowly as my vision cleared. The only weird thing was flashes of light off in the periphery of my vision that would occasionally make me think someone with a flashflight was trying to sneak up on me. That took the longest to go away.

Either the steroids or the iritis itself did something to my eye because there seemed to be a persistent patch of blurriness - that I could easily ignore - 'roundish 11 o'clock.

Now, Dr Takeda told me that a. often there is no known cause for iritis and b. people prone to iritis often have reoccurances.

Once the thing was well under control I went back to my GP for some information and she took a look at the *many* blood tests Dr Takeda had ordered, and the x-rays he had requested after looking at the bloodwork. It all came up negative, however there was a flag for a possiblity of a precursor to arthritis or other auto-immune disorders. She was about to dismiss that since I'm way too young to be developing auto-immune disorders when I stopped her. Rheumatism and gout run thick and fast in my dad's family.

So... that is still sort of hanging around as I haven't made it to the specialist - a rheumatologist - for more testing and such.


A couple of weeks ago I noticed growing pain around my right away. I'd had a very low key headache in my sinuses around the eye for a while but I tend to ignore stuff like that. I don't like drugging myself for every little thing or running off to the doctor for every little thing that pains me. So until it started to mess with my vision I ignored it.

So yeah, got back to the opthalmologist (after a terrific saga of dealing with the receptionists and lab techs who clearly do not want me in seeing the fucking doctor) and he spied it coming on in my right eye. Right away I restared the pred drops, but not as aggressively. Two days after the appointment the dosage dropped and it seemed like it was getting better. Then it actually started to get worse and then inside a day my left eye started acting up again.

this past Sunday I was basically blind in my right away and the vision in my left eye was a little cloudy. The right eye has remained more or less blind until today when I started being able to see large blurry object. With just my right eye I may not walk into trees but I can't recognize people, see anything more than arm's length away and definately can't read.

(To add to the saga I tried to reach Dr Takeda ahead of my Tuesday afternoon appointment. I left a message on Monday morning which never went anywhere and managed to speak with a technician in the afternoon who assured me there was nothing to worry about and just to come in as normal the next day.)

So Monday I had cloudy vision in my left eye and couldn't see a damned thing out my right eye. Tuesday was worse for my left eye and I have no idea how much worse my right eye could get than "blind." I kind of shrugged it off. When things get really bad for me personally (as opposed to bad for friends of family - that shit actually stresses me out pretty bad) I have a tendancy to get kind of blase, go through the steps to deal with and/or cope with the issue. This is mainly with material things, emotional things are different. So Tuesday I was pretty much legally blind in both eyes but there was still some function in my left eye. Therefore I was a pirate for Holloween since I already owned an eye patch (seriously - medical reasons).

Faith drove me to the appointment and Dr Takeda was impressed with the advancement of the iritis. The dosage wasn't strong enough and the condition adjusted to outpace it. So the dosage went back up, included both eyes and I got back on the pills.

the weird thing is this time there has been no discoloration. The only thing you *might* notice as odd about my eyes is that they're both dilated. I'm not sure what it does (besides ruin my near-vision and dilate my eyes), but I've been on atropine at one drop/day in each eye. So I was wandering around on Holloween, more or less blind, and people totally didn't realize it. My friends had to help me to keep from running into things and reading signs and menus and things for me.

I was a tiny bit panicked on Wednesday morning when I first woke up. IT seemed to me that the vision in my left eye (which had been poor on Tuesday but still good enough to keep me from walking into poles - barely) had become about as bad as the vision in my right. That is I couldn't see a fucking thing. The thing is you can still tell light. There's light everywhere in the morning and it just seems like you just need to rub the sleep from your eyes and you'll be good. Nothing doing.

Very fortunately my boyfriend came over to move my car so it wouldn't get a ticket and he helped me set an alarm to get the hourly drops going (couldn't see my cell phone's screen well enough to do it myself) and read the instructions on my pills to me. He had to run off to work so I had a very boring Wednesday of fooling around on this step machine I own, listening to short stories by W. Sommerset Maughum read aloud by actors, and pulling out my laundry. Also fielded an interesting phone call from my mom. I had arranged to go to her house to get some laundry done (laundromats spook me enough when I can see the strangers around me; I'm terrified of going some where milling with people I don't know that I also can't see). She kept telling me that her teacher friends were insisting she should take me to the hospital for an MRI, I kept insisting that I was going to abide by what the opthalmologist said unless she wanted to foot the cost of the MRI. But I kept sticking to the auto-immune story. Which led to a delightful tangent as my mom straight out asked me if I meant AIDS.

So yeah. Mom can get irritating at times, usually especially when she means well. Well-ish. she still buys the stigma that Good People Don't get AIDS. But she's been my mom all of my life and while I know her MO in an arguement is to have the last word, I've found an effective strategy for ending any possiblity of arguing is to flood her with information. Auto-immune disorders run the gammut from allergies to arthritis to lupus. Doctors don't know what really brings them on, but they are a fact of life. The immune system reacts to something - or nothing - and tries to "fix" the situation by attacking itself. The "d" in AIDS stands for "deficiency" and I'm certainly not deficient in immunity. I don't get sick very often and you don't have to wait very long when I'm in the company of a cat to watch my immune systen kick into overdrive.

Got a little bit of back up when I was home and I pulled out the methyl pills. My dad remarked that he would get prescribed the same thing whenever his gout acted up. But of course.

Anyway after the morning, the intense dosage quickly caught up to my left eye and I could get some minimal amount of reading in.

On Thursday morning I got back in to see Dr Takeda. He made sure that I understood just how precarious the situation is. He said that since I was going out of town this weekend I'd have to be very careful. If it got noticeably worse I should get to an ER and call him on his cell phone. I can't ease off the dosage any earlier than Monday. If it ever gets worse I have to take it up to a drop every half hour. He said if it doesn't get under control soon the next more aggressive step is a shot directly into the eye. Eugh.


It's bad enough having to fight myself to keep still when they measure the pressure on my eye lense with this blue laser that they ease up to be right against my eye. There is nothing ok about it but I just have to suck it up. Good God, it takes everything - holding my breath, grinding my teeth and grabbing my pant legs to keep from running away as they bring these damned things right up into my eyes. Then the doctor takes a look into my eyes with some other machinery that shines a bright white light into the eye. My eyes immediately start weeping and he has to hold my eyelids open. The eyes are dilated which intensifies the pain but means he can look all the way to the back of the pupil.

Guh. And if this treatment fails then we go to the needles. Blah.


At this point the progress seems promising. I'm good with it, I'd just like it to proceed faster. I'm going to San Francisco tomorrow and won't get back until Monday evening. I *heart* San Francisco and want to enjoy seeing it again. I know it's going to be a pain just because of the atropine, I'd like my vision not to be cloudy on top of barely tolerant of light. The light doesn't hurt, exactly, but even sunlight on an overcast day makes everything appear washed out and I have to squint really hard. I've joked about getting a welding mask, but seriously I have dark sunglasses and it still looks like the world is sunblasted and bright.


So. that's where I'm at.