Blessed by the Potato

I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, and my pupils were different sizes. That’s gonna need a trip to the doctor, I figured, but it went away when I turned on the big light to get a better look, and again in the morning things seemed fine.

I stayed up late to see the lunar eclipse, and couldn’t focus both eyes on the moon at the same time. Took a few days until I figured out that one eye wasn’t dilating in the dark, but in well lit settings everything seemed more or less fine.

So I finally scheduled that doctor visit.

I wasn’t sure whether this was a GP issue or optometrist issue, so started with GP. She gave me reqs for a bunch of tests and suggested I see the eye doctor, who was able to identify it as Horner’s Syndrome — a collection of symptoms from an interruption in the sympathetic nerve on that side of the face. He asked if I also wasn’t sweating there, which sounded crazy, but I hadn’t been feeling well enough to work up enough sweat to notice. Sure enough, I hopped on the exercise bike afterward and only sweat on one side of my face, which somehow is even more viscerally freaky-deaky than mismatched pupils in the mirror.

Now the syndrome points to a common proximal cause for those symptoms — that sympathetic nerve block. But the ultimate cause of that block could be a dozen things… Most of them bad.

Tumours (brain, spine, neck, lung), vascular complications (esp. carotid dissection), MS (already an S-tier fear for me), or perhaps an upper lobe lung infection or abscess in the jaw or sinuses can all potentially be the cause.

Never thought I’d be rooting for the bacteria.

An MRI will go a long way to figuring out the culprit driving this, and nothing to do now but wait and try not to worry until I get one (it’s in the works).