Catching up

Holy Moly, it has been 2 months since I last blogged. I don't know how the time has gotten away from me. However, in my defense I have been busy and have had some medical stuff going on. I will get into that later. I will touch on the highlights from the last couple months.

Halloween- Well I had to work Halloween Night, so I handed out candy to the little kids until about 6:15pm and then headed to work. We had around 30 kids come to our house, not too many, but enough.

Thanksgiving- Again I had to work. I actually worked Thursday-Sunday of that weekend, so needless to say I didn't celebrate the holiday in any fun way.

At the end of November, I had a routine eye appointment with my Optometrist. Well, it turned out that my optic nerve was swollen, meaning there was a bunch of pressure in my head putting pressure on my optic nerve. The Optometrist referred me to a neurologist, who examined me and then had me have an MRI of my brain to see what was going on.

I did not expect any of this after a routine eye exam. Let me tell you, having an MRI is not really a fun procedure. It's loud, crowded, and a little scary. I am glad I am not claustrophobic because I don't know if I would have been able to do it. But anyway, the MRI came back completely normal, no brain tumors or any other scary things, which was both good news and bad news. It meant that my brain looked good, but meant they would still need to do more tests.

I was also referred to a Ophthalmologist who took pictures of the back of eye to look at my optic nerve and to measure the pressure in my eyes. He basically told me the same thing as my Optometrist, which was that I had severe papillary edema.

My Neurologist was guessing that it was a "pseudo tumor " which means that my brain acts like a tumor is there, when really there is nothing abnormal. They don't really know why it happens. Anyway, the neurologist had to perform a spinal tap to diagnose and relieve the pressure. When she tapped me (which wasn't very fun) my pressure was 51, and normal is around 8. So there was a ton of extra pressure on my optic nerve, which if it gets bad enough can cause permanent eye damage. Yeah, pretty scary stuff.

During the spinal tap, she removed about 4 tubes of cerebrospinal fluid, which is a very high volume. This would relieve the pressure for about a day or two since the body just makes more cerebrospinal fluid. In order to treat the pseudo tumor, they put me on a diuretic to help slow the making of cerebrospinal fluid.

So there it is, my life for the last couple months. Like I said, it's been pretty crazy. Along with the diuretic, they are monitoring me pretty closely with every 2 weeks appointments with the Ophthalmologist. I never imagined having such a unique medical situation. However, I am finally feeling good, and at my last eye appointment they said the swelling was mildly better, so it's on it's way.

In other news, I accepted a new nursing position at Avera. I am going to work in the Recovery Room, which is where patients go immediately following surgery. It will be patients of all ages and of all surgeries. It will be 8 hour shifts which will be a nice change. One weekend every 6 weeks and one holiday per year. There won't be any night shifts, except for being on call, and every time I come in on-call it's time and a half. I am really looking forward to this new opportunity, but I will miss all my Ortho co-workers!

Sorry for the wordy post, but I had a lot to catch up on. I can't say my life is not interesting. Thanks for reading!