My Pseudo Sickness

Hi all…I’m sorry I’ve been M.I.A. lately, but I was just recently diagnosed with a condition called Pseudotumor Cerebri. For the past seven months I’ve been having dizziness, mild headaches and a whooshing sound in my ears. My doctor thought maybe it was from poor circulation at first, but that proved to be wrong. For a while I ignored it and chalked it up to just sitting too long at work.

Then a month or so ago the dizziness got so bad that it started scaring me. My ears constantly felt like I was flying in a plane and waiting them to pop, which they never did. My doctor said my blood pressure was dropping when I stood and that’s what was making me dizzy. I posted about that, but turns out what my doctor thought was a side effect from my medicine turned out not to be the cause either.

No one could explain the whooshing in my ears and that, along with the dizziness, were the most constant symptoms I had. My doctor sent me for an MRI…which was terrible…and that came back negative, thank God.

I’d started having increased headaches, so much so that I went through a 50 count bottle of Excedrine in 2 wks! That many pills would normally last me a year or longer. Then I started having pains in my eyes to go along with the dizziness, headaches and whooshing in my ears. Two weeks ago I started seeing double. It happened off and on, but it scared the heck out of me.

It was time for my annual eye exam so I went to my optometrist—told him about the pain in my eyes, headaches and double vision. He used that instrument they have to look into your eye and said, “Huh.”

Let me tell you, you never want a doctor to say that when they’re examining you. When he looked into my left eye he said, “This is weird.” Something else you don’t want a doctor to say while examining you.

He told me that if it wasn’t for the fact that I’d just had a clear MRI, he’d have though I had a brain tumor based on how swollen my optic nerve looked. Again, something you don’t want to hear. So he referred me to a Neuro-Optometrist. She diagnosed me with Pseudotumor.

Oh, I guess I should tell you what Pseudotumor Cerebri is. It’s basically too much fluid around the brain. There’s no known cause for it, but it’s more prevalent in women of child bearing age who are overweight—I’m two for two-lol.

I have to have a lumbar puncture—spinal tap—to measure the fluid and then I will start on a diuretic to run the fluid off. That should alleviate the pressure on my eyes, stop the headaches and the dizziness. I’ll have to shed some pounds which I was already doing and hopefully that’ll be the end of it.

I’m sharing this and going into detail, just in case someone else is out there suffering from this and can’t figure out what’s wrong with them. While no one wants to have anything wrong with them, you just don't know how good it feels to know what's wrong with you AND to know how to fix it.

I haven’t posted in a while because my eyes have been really tired and achy when I get off from work, and that’s usually when I get the double vision. But this weekend I did a lot of writing on my wip! And my eyes are doing well. I’ll be posting a little more frequently and maybe drop an excerpt since I don’t have to do much but cut and pastes.

If any of you have any questions, feel free to ask.

P.S. A.L. Sonnichen…I haven’t forgotten about your query, but I’ve been resting my eyes in the evening. I should be getting to it in a few days.

Take care everyone!