The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I used to have vision problems. They'd diagnosed me with central serous chorioretinopathy, which is one of those conditions that sounds scary but usually isn't. The main exception: sometimes it progresses to retinal detachment and you go blind. But this seemed unlikely enough that I wasn't too worried.
For years I'd get maybe one episode annually. Fine, whatever. Then a few months ago the frequency ramped up dramatically, and I started wondering if something was wrong.
I did what any reasonable person does when they suspect their diagnosis might be incorrect: I asked several AI models. They all said roughly the same thing: this doesn't look like CSCR. The visual field defects were appearing and resolving way too quickly. Plus I was getting headaches, eye pain, and nausea, though mostly just the scotoma by itself. None of this quite fit.
Today I had another episode and finally got myself to an ophthalmologist. I came prepared. I'd used an Amsler grid to map the exact coverage of the blind spot and tracked how it progressed over time. The smoking gun: this time I had clear evidence the scotoma was bilateral, affecting both eyes instead of just one.
ChatGPT (the 5 Thinking model) had been pretty insistent this was migraine with aura (and careful to exclude more concerning pathology like a TIA/amaurosis fugax). After the ophthalmologist spent several minutes blinding me with lights so bright they photobleached my retinas (and myrdriatics, couldn't read anything closer than two feet for a while afterwards, this is why I'd been putting off the appointment), guess what conclusion they reached?
Migraine with aura.
On one hand: relief. No risk of going blind after all. On the other hand: migraines suck, and I'm pretty annoyed that multiple doctors missed this. The symptoms appearing and disappearing so quickly should have raised immediate doubts about CSCR, which takes days to resolve. Even I started questioning it once the pain showed up, though admittedly I never jumped to migraines either. But my excuse is that I'm a psychiatrist, not an ophthalmologist.
Unfortunately, I was also diagnosed with ocular hypertension, which is a risk factor for glaucoma. Uh.. You win some, you lose some? And it's helpful for your clinician to run tests on you in person? Go see a doctor too, even if ChatGPT is very helpful. It sadly lacks thumbs.
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