I have relative of mine,about 50, who had difficulty in vision. Ophthalmologist advised him to wear glasses.By chance he happened to see a GP who informed him his case was not one of vision ,but of eye balls about to pop out and he immediately rushed to Specialty hospital where he was diagnosed with a disorder that has resulted in his eyeballs being held only by 40%.He was immediately operated upon and he is recovering.
Moral-better seek second opinion .Sometimes, though cynical it may sound , it may again be not 100% correct.Sometimes there are as many opinions as there are doctors.What are we to do?
Valerie Novak fervently wished doctors would stop telling her the intense headache she’d endured for several weeks was a migraine. For one thing, neither the Georgetown University senior nor her close relatives had headaches, and migraines are frequently familial. None of the increasingly potent drugs doctors prescribed was doing much good. And the 22-year-old had lost 15 pounds in three weeks from bouts of severe vomiting.
“I was so frustrated and upset,” recalled Novak of her ordeal last summer, which involved consultations with half a dozen doctors, several trips to area emergency rooms and two hospitalizations. Novak, who had always been healthy, said she feared the unrelenting pain in her left temple and associated symptoms were something “I’d have to live with for the rest of my life.”
Her mother, Kathy Novak, a nurse practitioner in Bowie, was similarly skeptical of the diagnosis but grateful that doctors had ruled out more ominous possibilities, such as a brain tumor. When her middle daughter began complaining about double vision, Kathy took her to an ophthalmologist. His judgment led to an accurate diagnosis that had nothing to do with migraines but was instead a rare complication of a common item listed on Novak’s medical records. Left untreated, it might have killed her……………….
Back home with her parents, unable to go to class, Novak recalled that her “eyesight was getting wonky, with really, really weird double vision.” Alarmed, her mother made an appointment with an ophthalmologist, hoping he might have an explanation that didn’t involve migraines.
After dilating Novak’s eyes, the eye specialist immediately spotted something alarming: Her optic nerves were dangerously swollen. “This is not a migraine,” he told Novak. “You have increased intracranial pressure.”
The unrelenting headache as well as the numbness, tingling and vomiting were caused by a rise in pressure in the brain. The condition, which can result from a head injury or meningitis, is considered a medical emergency; increased pressure caused by a buildup of fluid can permanently damage the central nervous system by restricting blood flow to vessels that supply the brain. In Novak’s case, the double vision was caused by pressure on her cranial nerve.
The ophthalmologist’s first thought, given Novak’s age and history, was pseudotumor cerebri, a rare condition sometimes called a false brain tumor, that affects women between ages 20 and 45. Valerie’s illness had nearly all the hallmarks but lacked one critical variable: She was not overweight or obese, as are most of those with the condition.
The ophthalmologist immediately sent Novak to Greenbelt neurologist Roger Whicker. She immediately began taking a drug to reduce the pressure and underwent another MRI and other testing, which revealed the actual cause of the illness and changed the diagnosis to sagittal sinus thrombosis, or SST, caused by a blood clot in her brain.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/02/AR2009020202209_2.html
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