What colour would you say that is?

Hola friends,

In the interest of trying to explain what my bout of optic neuritis is like (I think I'm on day 23 of it)...

My left eye has been misbehaving. It started with a killer headache and about two days into the headache I noticed a smudge on my glasses...only I wasn't wearing glasses. I thought it might just be aura associated with the headache, since I get visual disturbances before headaches fairly often. But no, it was a smudge that stuck! Not only a smudge, but a smudge that desaturates colour. SO WEIRD.

Many of y'all know that I'm a Photoshop tweaker. I'm excited by colour and texture. I looove rich colour. So, imagine my confusion at having regular colour saturation in one eye and not in the other.

It means this:

Kind of looks more like this:

*holy hell, Blogger. I've tried to fix this alignment for 10 minutes. Work on your image adjustment!

but much fuzzier. Duller and with a thin film of greenish brown covering certain areas now and then. Reds and oranges kind of look the same out of my left eye. Same with blues and greens. It's all a bit of a colour puddle right now. Also, y'know when you overexpose an area of a photo and a white wall and bright area of a face blend together with no discernible distinction in between? Yeah, I have that all over the place.

I can still read, write, and work just fine...the main issue for me was the pain associated with optic neuritis. Every time I looked far in any one extreme (left or right in particular), it felt like someone was suddenly pushing their finger in deep above my eye. Not fun! Not even the tiniest bit fun.

I'm happy to report that the pain has lessened. The blur hasn't changed...or not enough for me to perceive a change anyway. I can't say I'm happy that my vision is off, but it has definitely made me rethink some things in life. It makes hiking in the rain considerably more difficult because the shine of the water throws off my depth perception a little. I know that I ultimately face very real possibilities of becoming more disabled in life, and this blip on the radar has made me more determined to work around them. Incorporate them into my life as much as possible, without making them the focus. I want to hike for as long as I can do so safely and responsibly. I still want to drive...with the same qualifiers. I guess I just want to be me, and focusing on MS every minute of every day means I lose myself to it and become a person I don't have any desire to know, let alone become.

I love my life...even the desaturated version.

Now I get to tell my dad I've semi-experienced his colourblindness.

P.S. Last injection went really well. I'm switching up my routine a little and it paid off last week.