something else I take for granted...

...well, TOOK for granted until recently... MY EYES. I have other things wrong with my body but my eyes have always been GREAT. And my vision has been GREAT. And it has felt GREAT to not have to worry about this part of my body. As a little kid, I had earaches on a far too regular basis but my mom can't really even remember me ever having anything wrong with my eyes. So I guess in these past two weeks I've been making up for lost time! But finally, my two+ week journey with an inflamed iris seems to be coming to an end...many trips to the dr. and eyedrops later! I honestly thought it was all just allergies and/or an allergy headache when all of this silliness started. But after day four of an unrelenting headache right behind my eye and a very red eye, an optometrist and I started talking. He was pretty sure that it was just an inflammation of the upper inner eyelid because that's usually what these things are. Well, as luck would have it, my case turned out to be anything but usual! Three days later with no signs of improvement my optometrist and I were talking again. A look into my eye that took less than a nano-second revealed the real issue, "Oh, yes. It's what we talked about. The more difficult, painful diagnosis - iritis." Basically, TONS of white blood cells had crowded into my iris, presumably to attack something (which I'm assuming they got because there was a small army of them in there!). But they stayed. And collected at the bottom of the iris. And cause the iris to get inflamed. Which shrunk my pupil (the iris was so inflamed that it took my pupil over 45 minutes to dilate one day...and even at that it wasn't fully dilated!)...which basically makes you feel like you're squinting. Try that for nearly two weeks and your eye will hurt, too. As will the muscles behind it. And you'll have a headache. Honestly, I had no idea that some parts of your body could hurt like this!
Anyway, once we finally figured out what was wrong, the healing could begin. And it actually happened pretty quickly. First the pain went away with the help of ibuprofen - lots of ibuprofen. Then eye drops helped keep the eye dilated because, oh yeah I forgot to mention this (!!), with iritis your iris is so swollen that it bulges forward and pretty much "glues" itself to the front of the eye. Awesome. So these, miracle-of-modern-medicine, eyedrops kept my pupil dilating and constricting, all day and night, in an effort to "unstick" the iris from the front of the eye. This made my pupil look really freaky. All sorts of big and not round like it usually is...well, round but with odd bumps on the edges where it was still "stuck". Crazy stuff.
But it's SO much better now. I'm still saturating my eyes with eye drops each day but the pain is all gone. Thank goodness. For the record, I'm sort of a wimp with this sort of pain. So as soon as the pain was gone, I really didn't care that much about how long it would take for the rest of this to clear up. But it's only taken about five days once the heavy duty treatment began...which is pretty amazing. Especially considering that my doctor said that in their office, they only see a case like this (meaning a case this bad!) once a year. I told him that I was sorry to have delivered this case to him in January...it's going to be a long time until they see this again.
Let's hope!
I'm not eager for a repeat performance. And in all likelihood I won't have one. In most cases, iritis just happens. No real explanation. No real concerns except for getting it cleared up. If there is a recurrence then we have to do lots of tests to rule out other (mostly auto-immune) problems. So for many, many reasons, I'm hoping this case of iritis was my first and my last. I certainly made sure it was a memorable one!
I will make sure I go to the eye dr. regularly from now on - not that those missed visits would have prevented something like this. I will not take my vision for granted. And I'll say a little (or BIG) prayer of thanks that this chapter is coming to a close...