Reflection On A 100-Bird Shoot

In late September of 2014, my freshman year, I was at my FFA district trap shoot. This shoot was a 100-bird shoot, meaning we would go up to the line four times, shoot twenty-five shells spread out upon five stations, to shoot one hundred shells total. It was the third time to the line and I was on station three and my vision was gradually getting worse, causing me to miss more birds. But I continued to go up to the line and shoot. The fourth and final time we went up, it was my turn to shoot. I said pull and one bird came out, but there was a definite problem. I was seeing three.
I went to the eye doctor the next day. They ran several tests on me and couldn’t find anything wrong with me. Until they thought of the pressure test. My eye pressure …show more content…
I couldn’t see things half of the time and we had already been there for almost two hours and we hadn’t even spoken to a doctor yet. Once we talked to the doctors they told us everything was going to be fine and ran several other tests on me. When the results came back they showed I had a Pseudotumor cerebri. This occurs when the pressure inside your skull increases for no obvious reason. The symptoms for this type of tumor are the same as a brain tumor but can be worse because there is no physical tumor. They told me the types of treatment for this specific tumor using medication and surgery which was a huge relief. Since there was so much swelling around the optic nerve and so much pressure behind it, I was having the world’s worst …show more content…
The second day was their first take on relieving the pressure. They wanted to try with medicine so they put in an IV and started pumping it in. It didn’t work, it barely made a change to the pressure but did take almost all of my headache away. So, the next thing they could do is a spinal tap. Once we got into the operating room it was freezing. I had at least four blankets on throughout the procedure and I was still shivering. They did four spinal taps on me in one day. For the first two they missed and didn’t actually get anything. Then they finally got a hit. Once they were done with the spinal taps they went back and tested the pressure and it was down but it was not where they wanted it to be. They wanted to see if medication could bring it down the rest of the way before moving to the next step of surgery. Which was a great call because the medication worked and relieved the pressure the rest of the way. They kept me on the medication for a while to keep the pressure