I think one of the scariest aspects of ms problems are those affecting sight. My first ms symptom (unknown at the time) was optic nueritus (sp?) when I was in my 20s. Basically I lost vision in one of my eyes. My ability to focus on anything was restricted to a small iris like area in my one eye, everything else was dark and fuzzy. I went to an optometrist and a specialist but nobody made the connection to ms,perhaps because of my age and the fact that it was the first manifestation of ms-like symptoms. Anyway it lasted for a couple weeks and then returned to normal. It would be almost 20 years before another manifestation of symptoms but not optical in nature. In fact I have had so issues with my eyes since that initial symptom.

So thanksgiving morning I awoke as normal and put on my glasses and got on with my morning. Something was odd. My vision was really strange, I couldn’t put my finger on it. I hoped that I just needed to wake up and I placed my return to normalacy in a cup of coffee. Well that didn’t do much other than wake me up. My vision was still askew. I started to get a little scared. Then I realized that the problem I was experiencing was restricted to my left eye. My vision in teh right was just fine, but the left was blurry. I was starting to get a headache and I decided to try my old glasses. Walla! My old prescription seemed to fix the problem. How weird is this now? All of a sudden my new prescription has gone bad? My old glasses seemed to be fine. I couldn’t understand why this was happening. But something had obviously changed and the only thing I could attribute it to was a return of optic nueritius symptoms.

It was really strange to me that my prescription would change like that. But ms is a weird illness, anything can happen. I went through the holiday with my old glasses falling off my face. The next morning I woke up and tried my old glasses to see if anything had changed, I was disapointed to see (no pun intended) that nothing had changed. Well I thought, these things can take weeks. The good news was that I had my old glasses and they appeared to be working ok. So it wasn’t that bad.

Later in the day I was folding laundry, my old glasses kept sliding off my nose and bugging me. I took a step and felt something under my socked foot. I looked and it looked like a piece of glass. I had just found one outside in the grass, so I wasn’t too surprised. Perhaps it was the same piece of refuse that had fallen out of my pocket. I picked it up and I had my ms diagnosis. Not the usual ms diagnosis either. There was no”possibly”, no “maybe”, in fact no uncertainty at all. The glass was indeed the left lens from my glasses. When I knocked them off my nightstand the night before, it must have popped out. Well I popped it back in and begin teh wait for teh next “real” ms symptom.