Hope of deliverance

Continuing my string of hospital visits - four in 10 days, it’s some kind of personal record – I’ve recently had an eye clinic appointment.

This one was to discuss the optic neuritis damage/recovery from my relapse in January.

I’ve hated this relapse. It’s not like I have ones I love, let’s be honest, but this one has been a truly depressing one.

Eyesight is a particularly terrifying one for me: I’m already quite short-sighted, I have posterior vitreous detachments in both eyes and there’s a family history of glaucoma. The cards do not feel stacked in my favour.

I have also failed to find an eyepatch which at once says cutting edge chic and devil-may-care. Although my lovely work colleague did buy me a red lacy boudoir-esque one which may yet come in useful if I’m ever invited to a certain kind of niche party.

The results of this one showed that in the past 10 months I’ve gone from not even being able to see the board on which the eyechart is mounted, to being able to read the third line from the bottom.

My colour vision doesn’t have quite such happy news though – I couldn’t make out any numbers on the colour blindness chart in January and it’s still a struggle to discern half of them. This I knew as I’m aware my left eye sees the world in watercolour not acrylic, but it’s still a bit sad to have it medically proven by the surprisingly old fashioned flip book.

But I’m going to remain doggedly positive as I still have the potential of two more months of recovery, having been told ON can take up to 12 months to recover, if not longer. I cling to the longer.

What astonishes me though (apart from the body’s ability to recover in the relapsing phase of MS) is the time discrepancy between the damage occurring and the subsequent recovery time.

First relapse: 30 minutes for left hand side to be knocked out, six months for recovery.

Biggest relapse: 40 minutes for speech and all motor control down right hand side to go, 16 months for recovery.

Optic neuritis: 60 minutes for vision to go, 10 months (and counting) for recovery.

I say recovery, it’s actually never been 100 per cent, but it’s been okay and to a level I can live with, but good heavens why must it take so long?

Be patient is a mantra you learn to live by when you have MS. Be patient and keep hope.

So that’s what I’m doing for my eye. I will wait and hope and wait and hope until the time shows that recovery will be incomplete. And then maybe I’ll just wait and hope a bit more.

:: Hope of deliverance by Paul McCartney