pictures soon, I promise ...

This week has been a tough week, and it's only Thursday. I was out of the office for a day and a half, and missed some coaching time, because of a particularly vexing vision problem that comes and goes. I've had symptoms of this condition since I was about 12 or 13, but only received a diagnosis earlier this year. The condition is called superior oblique myokymia (SOM), and it's a fairly rare vision disturbance. Only about 6000 people have been diagnosed with SOM.*

The link above gives the medical explanation. The layman's description is that I get double vision, with a pronounced shimmering or bouncing up-and-down of everything in my field of view. According to the neuro-opthamologist who finally figured out the problem, the likely origin is vascular compression of the trochlear nerve -- a blood vessel presses on a nerve which fires abnormally and makes my vision go nuts.

So, when this all happens, I get "bouncy vision" which leads to headaches. If the headaches and constant motion in my field of view persist long enough, I get nauseated. This week, my symptoms were bad enough and constant enough to keep me from driving -- if everything is bouncing up and down, it makes it hard to see other cars clearly!!

The good news is that this is a benign condition. It does not have any serious health consequences, beyond the annoyances that I described above. And, while some people experience symptoms on a nearly-constant basis, mine come and go. I had not had serious symptoms for a couple of months, until this weekend.

The bad news is that it is also not easily treatable. Some patients have shown limited benefits from certain anti-seizure medications. However, the medicines are extremely potent and the side effects are significant, and possibly worse than the annoyance of SOM. The other option is surgery -- a teflon pad is inserted between the artery and the nerve, which reduces the vascular compression. However, only a few doctors perform this surgery, and I don't think my condition is severe enough to warrant what is essentially invasive brain surgery. Right now, my best "treatment" is to get a lot of rest, as fatigue can make the symptoms worse.

The only up-side to all of this is that I can still knit!!! In fact, one of the only ways that I get any relief from symptoms is a pronounced "down-gaze" -- looking down instead of straight ahead, like looking down your nose at your lap. Or, say, looking down at a pair of socks-in-progress! So, since looking straight ahead makes everything bounce, there was no blogging (or any computer time, or driving, etc.) for a couple of days. But, looking down is good, so there was some knitting.

I'm feeling better now -- for no particular reason, other than perhaps resting. I promise, photos of a SOM-induced FO tomorrow, as well as a significant progress on another WIP!!!

* I'm sure that many more people are likely to have this condition. It took me several doctors and over a decade to get a diagnosis. In the past year, I saw 2 excellent neuro-opthamologists at two outstanding hospitals -- the Mass Eye and Ear Infirmary, a Harvard affiliate, and the Tufts-New England Medical Center -- and sat through hours of complex and expensive testing. Since Boston is a major medical center, and since my employer offers excellent health insurance options, I was lucky to have access to high quality care. I'm sure that a majority of Americans don't have this level of health care, much less those in the developing world ... so, I'm sure that others with this condition just aren't diagnosed.