LadyA - that's encouraging news! Yep - prayers and wishes from this group certainly make a difference in many, many ways!
keep us posted..
Char

LadyA glad to hear the good news about your sister. I'd be happy to light a candle and offer a prayer of continued recovery for your sister.

Jen

Bringing this back to the top.....

It sure couldn't hurt to send some of that my way.

I have a thing called ocular toxoplasmosis. My mom was exposed to it while I was still in there. It's the disease they always warn women about that can be carried in cat boxes. Mom never had a cat until I was 11 so it was likely an undercooked piece of meat.

Anyway, in a toxoplasmosis baby the protozoa typically resides behind the retinas and decides to act up now and again. It took the middle of my left retina when I was about 10 leaving me with a legally blind eye. It's acted up in the right eye periodically since I was 15 and up until now has avoided the field of vision. Well, this time my luck either just held out or didn't depending on how you look at it.

It nearly did the same thing to my right eye as it did to the left but landed just off the macula. One more incidence on the same line and my luck is out, so prayer and positive thoughts that it does not recur would be appreciated.

Consider the positive thoughts on their way...My sister-in-law had a couple of miscarriages before they figure out it was the cat litter..I never knew taht it could still cause problems like this...keep us updated..
Char

I noticed in your profile that you're a baseball fan....So, consider my best wishes to be the magical, gravity defying, unhittable "GYROBALL" of best wishes.

Ah! A Red Sox person! I'm a Mets person but the Red Sox are my American League team.

Char - that's a little odd with a couple of miscarriages - one would definitely be suspect. The odds were my mom was exposed in the third trimester. If it had been the first there'd likely be no me and if it were in the second I might be institutionalized because it'd be in my brain. So in my own odd way I'm lucky.

The good news for those looking at the being a mom angle is that once you are exposed to it you develop antibodies and don't get it again. I figure my three younger brothers owe me big!

fezo,

Our prayers and positive thoughts will be with you. Keep us posted on how you are doing.

All they have been able to figure out is how to attack it when it shows up. They put me on four different medications which aren't terribly pleasant. Used to be that they just put you on prednisone to knock down the resulting inflammation.

Now, in the age of AIDS they have these drugs that are designed to knock down the flare up. They need to do that because this stuff could kill an AIDS patient. For me it saves my eye for at least another episode. As a result they aren't too picky about side effects.

I am relatively through this episode but it has been the scariest ever both because it mean the next one is it unless it deviates from the middle and the fact that it was a couple of weeks of going to a retina specialist every few days before they figured I would pretty much make it this time.

I have to still use larger print and I don't know if that is going to be here to stay. Incredibly, after only a few weeks off, I can still drive. Had to stop for a couple of weeks which was a real drag. More so because I still have little kids. Didn't have the first until my last day of being 37. She's now 18, but she has three younger sisters - 14 and a pair of fives.

Anyway, that's the story at the moment. I've got other chronic things but for the moment they are more or less leaving me alone...