Do you suffer with headaches?
Linda, I’ve changed her name for privacy, had been having headaches that were so bad, she passed out in the shower and split her chin open on the vanity. They’d been happening for a while and she wasn’t normally a headache sufferer.
So, like any sensible person, who cared for their health, she visited her GP. Well, not her usual GP, she was too hard to get into these days. She ended up seeing a young GP, who turned out to be lovely. He said it was unusual for Linda to have such bad headaches. He wondered if they were premenstrual migraines and suggested Linda keep track of how often they happened and how long they lasted in a diary. She did this but by the next Sunday the headaches were almost constant. They were especially bad when she was lying down or reaching down to pick up her hand bag. She’d also noticed some strange things happening to her vision. Not all the time, just occasionally, she’d notice that she couldn’t quite see the letter on the keyboard that she was looking directly at, and could only see it when she looked past it.
Linda came to see me, a random optometrist who was doing a shift as a favour for another optometrist, on a Sunday. She explained to me her symptoms and described the odd vision problems and headaches she had been experiencing.
This was in the old days, about nineteen years ago, and I didn’t have all the fancy schmancy optometry toys that I have now. The technology didn’t even exist.
I had an uneasy feeling in my gut when she described the severity of her headaches and the fall in the bathroom.
I checked her vision. It was 20/20 (or 6/6 to be precise - after all, we Australians favour the metric system). No problem there. I checked her pupil reactions - normal. I checked her eye movements - all good, maybe a little bit of double vision when she looked to the left. Then I checked her optic nerves, using an ophthalmoscope, probably the most old fashioned and archaic piece of equipment I had. I was a young and inexperienced optometrist then, but I knew immediately that her optic nerves were not normal. They were swollen and bloody.
I knew what this meant. Linda’s life was in danger, her swollen optic nerves meant that for some reason, she had elevated pressure in her brain. I did not know the cause, just by looking at her nerves but I knew that I needed to get Linda to a hospital very quickly.
Linda could probably tell by the look on my face that the news wasn’t good. I tried to be calm and explain that her swollen nerves were likely to be related to something serious and that she needed a brain scan as soon as possible. I asked her to call her husband and have him come and take her to the hospital. The next morning, Linda had a large tumour removed from the left side of her brain. And just like that, I, her random Sunday optometrist, had saved her life.
I don’t know what happened to Linda because I never went back to work at that clinic again. I moved off to the country to run my own practice. I heard that a few months later she came back to the practice with a bunch of flowers for me. It was wonderful to hear that she was OK and I still think of her now, every time a patient comes in with a headache, especially an unusual one. She is the reason I always tell my patients to get a second opinion and never to ignore atypical headaches. So thanks to you Linda, for keeping a young optometrist on her toes and for always being my reminder to make no assumptions.
So yes, your optometrist can save your life! But remember, you are the more important part of the picture. If you have ANY odd visual symptoms or strange headaches, always see your optometrist sooner rather than later.