bad news + funny shit

Wednesday: mom has a HARD seizure and is super exhausted and out of it -- the kind that makes her wonky for 1-2 weeks. She had a hard one about 4 days earlier, and she was already out of it and it was hard to get her to keep drinking water.

Thursday : I take her to her scheduled upper and lower endoscopy (because she's epileptic, they have to knock her out completely instead of giving her the twilight stuff) - we were there for 5 hours because emergencies kept coming in at the hospital and staff had to keep shifting us down the sheet

Friday night: she gets spots in her vision of her left eye, thinks she's just tired, and goes to bed

Saturday morning: she decides to tell me that she lost some vision in her left eye due to these big spots, so I take her to the ER - doc does an eye ultrasound and a CT scan of her head, says nothing "emergency worthy" is going on and sends us home with a referral to see an ophthalmologist "when you can" because it's probably ocular migraines.

My mom says it's a little better than it was the night before, and since both me and my dad have ocular migraines, and she thought it sounded similar, we went home.

Wednesday: we're finally able to get in to see the ophthalmologist (he would've taken us sooner if he thought it was anything other than a checkup) and as soon as he hears what my mom is complaining about, he does a dilated eye + contrast dye scan and finds CRAO (central retinal artery occlusion/blockage) and he tells us we need to go see a retinal specialist.

It was 4:55pm when we got out of there (because they were super busy so we were there for FOUR HOURS) and of course the retinal specialist office was already closed, so I called the ophthalmologist back and they're like oh don't worry just call tomorrow morning.

I've already looked up CRAO and I'm freaking out. I've had a couple patients years ago who had CRVO (central retinal vein occlusion), but never dealt with CRAO and I knew that was worse than CRVO.

CRAO is a blockage of the main artery of the eye, and once you have CROA, you can treat it, but within 5 years you'll probably lose all vision anyway.

My mom was like well it's a little better than it was so don't freak out, and once I found the report from the ophthalmologist, I saw he said CRVO, not CRAO. So whew!

Thursday morning: I have to call four offices just to get everybody to find what they're supposed to have to get us an appointment at the retinal specialist's office. They give me the first available emergency appointment, which is the next morning.

Friday (yesterday): We were at the retinal specialist's clinic for 5 hours, but they did tons of testing on her and said that part of it was improving on its own, but that to really treat it she needs injections in her eyes once a month for 3 to 6 months.

He said it's not the central vein -- it's branch so that's not as bad as central vein and definitely not as bad as artery but still worrisome.

They did the first injection, which was actually a series of three injections into the eyeball.

It sucks, and there's about an 80% chance she'll recover full vision in that eye, but at least it's not CRAO and losing her vision completely within 5 years.

2 fun things that came from this super stressful thing:

1. some of the spots in mom's vision are from hemorrhages/blood leaking out of the veins (it looks like she's got freckles all over her eye in the scans)

and when they were doing the eye tests on her they had her look at an LED TV - the spots turned purple - like glowing purple - and she was like what's going on?!

Here at the house all our electronics have blue light filters on them for her seizures. Our TV is plasma (we hope it never dies -- it's 12 years old already) in the family room doesn't emit blue light either, that's why we love it.

So she never looks at any kind of screens that are just plain LED until she went to the doc's office.

Blue light + red blood = purple 😂

2. At the end of the visit they took us into a small area with a scheduler, and we scheduled out all the appointments for more injections.

The woman then handed me a paper with the schedule on it, and she had used a Sharpie to fill in 5 dates/times and they were HUGE!! Those five dates/times took up both sides of the paper with nothing else on it!

I'm so glad there was nobody else in the scheduling room because I let out the stupidest bark of laughter when I saw it.

I get why they do it, but I wasn't expecting it because I was too stressed and tired from working + dealing with mom and dad's health issues to think about it until I saw it and it hit me almost as hard as all the signs in the parking lot being bent over because people have hit them with their cars 😂

Oh and I got her an eye patch to help with the pain and discomfort and tiredness the eye is feeling and keeps saying "aaarg" and asking for a parrot for her shoulder 🦜