auto-immune disease anyone?

ok, so i met with the NO again yesterday. learned some stuff, feel slightly better actually. apparently it is optic neuritis. why? well, frankly because it's not anything else. after getting tested for a crapload of stuff that all came back negative, that's our best guess. that, and it seems to be getting a little better. and optic neurotis does that, gets better on it's own, at it's own pace. well, ok. i can live with that.

then came the trickier question. how do we stop it from happening again? and is there REALLY no correllation to surgery since that does seem like one heck of a fluke. well, he says, i guess it does, sort of.

how's that? well, i guess when you have surgery your immune system is really low. and as it builds back up you're more susceptible to "catching" auto-immune diseases. kind of like pregnancy he says, they say the best "cure" for ms is pregnancy, while you're pregnant you won't show it. however, right after you give birth is the time when most people develop ms if they're going to.

what a segue.... so.... since we were talking about ms... my chances are still about 30% of developing ms in the next 5 years. however, that's assuming that i do not have a reoccurring episode of ON. if that happens, my percentages skyrocket. i will have another mri in june/july. if that's "clean" then my percentages go down. but i will continue to be monitored yearly after that. if those remain unchanged and no more ON then i'm pretty clear.

but here is the interesting part. i might never get ms. this *could* be a fluke. how's that? well, because my father had lupus when i was conceived. he died 4 years later. i have the genes. however, apparently there's no "lupus gene." what happens is that it makes you more susceptible to all auto-immune diseases in general. so i could get any of them basically. whatever got aggravated when i had surgery decided to attack my optic nerve. it could have been anything. now, this could be isolated, or it could have set of the chain of events for ms for me. we just don't know.

upside? i got the ok to have lasik! woo! gotta look at the bright side.