My silence...

I apologize to my readers about my recent silence.  I left for vacation at the end of June feeling fantastic, and had posts lined up while I was gone.  When I got back, my health took a turn.  It started with the mother of all sinus infections, and when that cleared up the headaches remained.  They were intense, and covered my entire head, not just my sinus areas.  My vision started to change, and being in front of a computer became a challenge.  I couldn't do it for more then a few minutes at a time until my eyes hurt.


On July 20th, I had had enough.  My eyes hurt, my head hurt.  My first thought was to go to an optometrist. to make sure my eyes were healthy.  They went through their tests, making sure I could see properly, and took pictures of my retina so I didn't have to dilate my eyes.  The doctor then saw me, and told me it really sounded like my symptoms were just leftover from my sinus infection I had the week prior.  Then she opened my retina photos.  She looked at them for a moment, and the color drained from her face.  "Oh Kim," was all she could say.  When she finally composed herself, (somewhat) she showed me the pictures of my eyes and compared them to normal eyes.  My optic nerves were swollen.  Optic nerves rarely swell for any other reason except if there is "surplus matter" in the brain pushing on them.  Aka...a brain tumor.  This lady cried on me, seriously.   She connected me with her primary care physician, she said I needed to see another doctor right away.  So, she called and made me the appointment, and I went over there to see him.

This doctor was more professional.  He said it could be a number of things, a virus to a brain tumor.  He scheduled the MRI immediately so we could cross off the deadly things off the list.  This was when my girlfriends started showing up.  Luckily I have two who are nurses.  Bless them.  One showed up at 2:30 with me at the PCP, and the other met us at the Digital Imaging place.  After being shell shocked in an MRI thing (those things are LOUD!), and chatting with my girlfriends my doctor calls.  Like, 20 minutes after I was done, which freaked me out.  I said to my friends, this is too quick, I must be dying.  But I wasn't.  There was no tumor, no clot.  Nothing.

In the end, I have been diagnosed with a chronic illness called Benign Intracranial Hypertension also known as Pseudotumor Cerebri.  It's rare.  I may never know anyone else with this condition in my life.  You might not ever know anyone with this in your life.  That's how rare it is.  I had more of a chance of having a tumor, then I did having random pressure in my head.

I'm on some medication that's supposed to help, and it is.  So hopefully I can get caught back up on sharing pictures of my vacations with you.  For now it's day by day, some days I'm well enough to sit at the computer, some days I'm not.