A Few More Details

So a little more detail about the vision problems I've been noticing.

For about a week now, I've been telling Scott that I feel like I'm looking through cardboard toilet paper thingies. It's not that I have tunnel vision, exactly -- there's no black edges to my vision, like I get right before I pass out.

But I used to have really good (better than "normal") peripheral vision, and I don't anymore. If I hold hands on both sides of my head where I used to be able to see them, I can just see a hint of my left hand and my right hand is invisible. It's weird, and Scott says the reason I don't have black holes where my vision is bad is because the brain just sort of stretches what it can see so it fills in the blanks. Weird.

I've also been feeling like I can't keep my eyes as open as normal. It's like my eyelids weigh 5 lbs each or something. That symptom, of course, freaked me out a bit because having trouble with her eyelids is the first identifiable symptom my mom had of her myasthenia gravis.

And my eyes hurt, particularly if I have to move them much, but even if I don't. It feels kind of like a bad case of eye strain in some ways, although it has gotten worse over the course of the week.

So the test the eye doc did that showed abnormalities is the Humphrey Matrix with Frequency Doubling Technology. The glaucoma hemafield test was "outside normal limits." Mean deviation: -3.77. Pattern standard deviation: +4.7 P<0.5%. And don't ask me what any of that means since I haven't a clue. :)

Since I just had an eye exam in November 2007 and my glaucoma tests were normal, the eye doc said that definitely wasn't the problem. So he said the most likely cause of my symptoms was the optic neuritis. The following is the printout of my test results for my right eye. The bottom matrices would be all white boxes if my eyes were normal. There's gradations with just a few spots in a square up to the solid black ones. The eye doc said it isn't as bad as it could be, which I guess is good. I could have been happy with all white squares though, which is sort of what I expected in that I didn't expect any of the tests to show anything wrong with my vision.
And then the photo below is the test results for my left eye, which as you can see is much better than my right, although still considered abnormal results: