Watching my stomach slowly grow while knowing I wouldn't have my mothers guidance was very hard for me. I spent most of my days crying and screaming at God. I completely lost my trust in him and slowly walked away. I became numb inside.... a feeling you can not explain in any other word, but NUMB..... It took a long time for any feeling to began surfacing again for me, but it never fully came back.
I noticed throughout my pregnancy that when I would look at the wall I would see blotches and smudges. Most things began looking dirty almost...... I would stare at an object and it would began to have a white ring along it's edges... almost like a full body Halo.
I was hit by a car in my 9th month of pregnancy. The baby was fine, but I began experiencing daily headaches along with anxiety. It was shortly after this that I began experiencing little wisps in my vision when I looked at the sky. It was the strangest thing.
Now before I go any further I want to let you in on something.... 3 years before this I went through a bout of depression. I started feeling disconnected from myself and also noticed some weird vision symptoms such as the feeling the my eyes were set back in my head to far... and I also felt like I was floating. I noticed a lot of eye floaters as well. It first began after a night of arguing and crying with my then boyfriend. I woke up with my first case of Vertigo, then that led to a constant off balance feeling. Then my vision dimmed out and everything looked darker than normal. I also saw what I called Gnats when I looked at things outside. They were little black spots that would dart around... and no, they were not Gnats! From then on it was a daily nightmare of waking up and not recognizing myself in the mirror and complete self hate. I woke up only to pray for death. How could a 23 year old not recognize herself. I slowly started feeling like I didn't really connect with anyone in my family or my friends. I remember one night in particular I had a decent day, went to get my hair done and by the time I left somehow I forgot what road I was on. I didn't recognize any of the streets. Everything looked so distant to me. I made it home and recovered of course, but it was such a scary thing to go through. I never thought I would get past it. Within 2 months however, after being put on anti depressants I slowly got better. I left my boyfriend, lost my house, bought a new car and started over with my life. I still never felt 100% like my old self, but I took it as a maturing point in my life.
Now this brings us to December 3rd. I went through 18 hours of labor. 3 injections of the epidural medicine and 2 actual epidurals since the first one failed. I pushed for about 30 minutes to get him out. Once he came out.... the world changed for me and not in the way I expected it to. My vision became darker for one. I blamed this on being tired. However I didn't ever want to hold my son. It felt unreal to me. How could I be a mother??? I played it off as much as I could. Visitors came and went in the hospital. I would play the Happy new mother role, all while I knew something was wrong. I stayed up both nights at the hospital watching my son sleep just to make sure he didn't stop breathing. It didn't stop there. I had a breakdown once we got home from the hospital. I ran to my room and stayed there with my son. I didn't want my dogs around him in fear that they would attack him. Once I began getting more comfortable with allowing more company over I started actually taking my son in to the living room. However, the late night obsessions about his breathing continued. I decided to go see my family doctor with concerns that I was experiencing postpartum depression or some form of postpartum anxiety. He immediately put me back on the anti depressant. I can only tell you in one word what happened with in a few weeks of taking that pill..... Madness!!!! I literally felt like I was going crazy. I started imaging horrible things happening to my son and seeing vivid images of this in my head. This scared the crap out of me. I started getting the daily head aches again, this time they were different. It was pain upon waking that only got worse as the day went on. (I was seeing a chiropractor while this was all going on since the accident, but none of it helped.) I decided to see a different dr. who helped me the last time with the depression. She decided to put me on a different medication. I took it for a very short time and immediately tapered off quickly once I noticed a new symptom. My vision had spots. Almost like static t.v. Everything looked a little distorted and smudged. Now this ONLY occurred in doors and on surfaces. I do not see it in the day light which is very weird as well. At night I see it on EVERYTHING however. I started researching online and came across a site for people suffering with a rare, untreatable thing called Visual Snow. I went in to shock and cried for weeks and weeks after reading this. Symptoms would sometimes get worse for people, sometimes better. Sometimes they went away on their own sometimes nothing changed. I was hoping they would stay for me... however that was not the case. I started seeing trails in my vision as cars would pass me by while driving. I would see the end of their car continue to pass after they had already passed milliseconds before. Then came the after images... this is the most bothersome symptom of all, (and I thought the static was at first).. I now can stare at an object for a few seconds and look away and still see the image in my vision. It is a negative image, (like the negatives you get when you get your film developed, but in gray). I wish this symptom would go away the most!!!!! Also, most of us on the board has something called Depersonalization or Derealization. Depersonalization, or DP for short, is the feeling of not being connected to your surroundings. You don't feel like yourself or have any connection to yourself. Kind of like an empty shell or a robot. I get this feeling quite often. The other, which I don't think I've really had.. maybe once of twice is Derealization, or DR. This is the feeling that your surroundings are unreal and look fake.
I started realizing however, that the more I visited the board, the more I would obsess over my symptoms and began ignoring my new baby and my husband. I stayed connected with a couple of people from the site and they kept me updated on any new findings. It turns out there was one diagnosis that most of us, who got tested, not including myself and I will explain in one second, was that they all have something called a Patent Foramen Ovale. P.F.O. for short.
A patent foramen ovale (PFO) allows blood to bypass the lungs. A baby's lungs are not used when it grows in the womb, so the hole does not cause problems in an unborn infant. The opening is supposed to close soon after birth, but sometimes it does not. In about 1 out of 3 or 4 people, the opening never closes.
In about 1 out of 3 or 4 people are good odds that someone you know may have it, but what about a whole online community with the SAME rare symptoms???? Now some people on the site knew that this diagnosis tied them with everyone else, but they didn't think it was the cause of their symptoms. Some were determined to think it was migraine headaches as their dr.'s diagnosed. Complicated Migraine Aura or Migraine related Persistent Aura... etc. Migraine Aura... maybe....Many migraine sufferers have visual phenomenon right before their Migraine attacks.... I myself was having horrible headaches when this came about. As a child I would sometimes get horrible migraines. I remember, and this still stands the case today, I would never like when my mom or dad would pat me on the head because it would hurt so bad. A strange shock sensation would occur when it was touched. This doesn't happen always, but sometimes. I also recall having a very strange thing happen when I was about 7 or so. I woke up once out of a dead sleep and began experiencing everything in slow motion. It was literally EVERYTHING going in slow motion. No trails or anything like that, but slow steps, slow ticks from the clock, slow thinking.... I just read about this possible being related to strokes. I sometimes get strange neck twinges. Where my head/neck would jerk real fast on its own followed by a strange sensation of pulling along with pain on the left side of my head right above and behind my ear.
Now back to my point..... this PFO connection. The reason I have been so stuck on this being the possible reason for my vision/headache problems is because I myself was one of those born with a hole in my heart. Was it a PFO? I am not sure. My parents used to tell me as I was a child that I was born with a hole in my heart, but the specialist said it eventually closed. This is what normally happens when a child is born of course.........
My theory as of late is:
Before I got pregnant I was working out 5 days a week. I was in the best shape of my life. However I began getting headaches after my workout. I then became pregnant, went through a heck of a time with stress after losing my mom and then getting married that maybe it put stress on my heart? Then comes child birth...... they say some people can have a stroke just from passing a bowel.... try passing an 8 lb 9 ounce baby, (I bet you thought I was going to say turd huh? haha)...and imagine what that mixed with a potentially bad heart..... could it be possible that I have always had a small hole in my heart and it just opened up more from the straining of child birth?
But wait, I have more:
PFO and Migraine:
Research has shown a higher prevalence of PFO among Migraineurs than among people without Migraine.3 Small observational and case-control studies indicate that patients with cryptogenic (of unknown origin) stroke have a higher incidence of patent foramen ovale.4 It's still under investigation whether patent foramen ovale closure prevents recurrent strokes. It is thought to be possible that blood without enough oxygen may trigger a Migraine when it reaches the brain.
also see:
ORLANDO, FLA—Patients with a history of stroke and a patent foramen ovale have a higher prevalence of migraine with aura than the general population, and after percutaneous patent foramen ovale closure for stroke prevention purposes, they report a reduced frequency of migraine attacks, a new study showed. The finding suggests that a paradoxical embolism passing through the right-to-left shunt in the heart caused by an open foramen ovale may cause not only strokes but migraine as well, the investigators said.
Beginning in 1999, several reports from neurologists using transcranial Doppler suggested that patients with migraine with aura—but not migraine without aura—appeared to have more cardiac right-to-left shunts than controls, said lead author Markus Schwerzmann, MD, of the Swiss Cardiovascular Center Bern, in Switzerland (now at the University of Toronto).
“Clinically, symptoms of aura are sometimes difficult to distinguish from the symptoms of transient ischemic attack,” Dr. Schwerzmann said in an interview. “We were wondering whether these patients with migraine with aura might also have more often a patent foramen ovale that might be responsible for triggering their migraine attacks.”
So you see the link?? I know there is a lot of speculation still between the 2 being related and some who say it isn't.... however I am not going to give up yet. I am making an appointment soon to get checked for a P.F.O. I am praying I have one.... yes this must sound weird... but a diagnosis gives me hope for closure and a possible good outcome if this is connected.
I will keep you posted....
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