Horner's Syndrome

In 2010 I was the owner of a Riding School and had been for a couple of years. I had been working with horses for a little over a decade and running and then owning a Riding School was in many ways the natural culmination of that work. Initially I was brought in to run the Riding School, located on the outskirts of the nearest Market Town. The school had been established almost 20 years ago by the land owner but, by her own admission, she was getting tired. When I arrived there were just under one hundred clients. After six months the landowner suggested that I take on the running officially so I bought the rights to the Riding School and began to really grow the business. By the end of 2009 the active client base was up to 300 or so and we were taking new ones on at a rate of one every 2 days. Just as I was beginning to make a profit the landowner decided to sell, without telling either me or any of the liveries, some of whom had been with there through a number of horses. The new owners, when they eventually arrived, did not want the hassle of a school. So even though I still had a client base of between 300 and 400 I had to find a new venue which proved impossible so I had to close the business.

The months either side of the closure were very stressful on me and the family. I managed to keep a small number of clients, those with their own horses and as I was teaching one of these I began to feel unwell and my right eye started to weep. This carried on for a few days before my partner persuaded me to go to the doctor, who diagnosed Conjunctivitis and prescribed drops, which had absolutely no effect. I eventually developed a whole range of symptoms including: headaches right across the front of my head, behind the eyes; a cough; tiny lesions on the right half of the top of my head; a loose bowls; and strangest of all a drying and flacking of the skin on the right hand, which appeared and disappeared in as short a time as half an hour. A return visit to the doctor gave a new diagnoses of Head Shingles for which she prescribed another set of drugs.

There was a mix up with the prescription, one of the drugs came in two boxes with different designs and even two different names, and as a result I found myself taking double the dose and within two days I was being sick every few minutes with a complete inability to keep anything down, even water. By lunchtime of the second day my partner called the doctor’s and when they suggested that I come in she told them that it was impossible, so it was agreed that a doctor would come out on a home visit. It was only once my own doctor arrived around tea-time that the error with the drugs was discovered. Having sorted out the issue around the dosage I got back to what passed for normal in a day or so.

The meds to deal with the Shingles had absolutely no effect. So a few days later we were back at the doctor’s. This time I saw a locum who thought it might not be Shingles and sent me to the eye department at a hospital at a seaside town 35 miles away. The partner drove me as I was not really up to it and we had been advised that it was not good for me to be driving because the tests might prove bad for my eyesight in the short term.

As is often the case when one presents to hospital my blood pressure was taken and it was 240/100. My partner was convinced that I would be hospitalised with those measurements but I was not. After an MRI Scan and much painful digging in my tear ducts with stainless steel medical pokers the doctors were no nearer making a diagnosis. They had, however, noticed that my right upper eyelid had dropped so that it was resting just above the pupil. With symptoms ranging from headaches, a cough, a dropped eyelid and my alarmingly high blood pressure the medics were struggling to come up with any firm diagnosis so they sent me home.

A few days later I received a letter from my doctor asking me to come in for a consultation during which she admitted that she had no idea what I had. We discussed the possibility of me having either a single problem or even three or more separate ones and any combination therein. She was, however, concerned about my blood pressure and put me on a new regime of drugs.

I was 47 and being a male I was not happy at the concept of having to take drugs for the rest of my life so started agitating for the doctor to let me bring my blood pressure down by lifestyle changes. At no point was the concept of a Stroke mentioned, except in passing. There was never any form of conversation around exercise, diet, stress management. The doctor gave me a medicine to help calm the coughing and things were left at that.

Eventually I was sent to a Cough Clinic at yet another local hospital. I underwent a hole range of tests which proved that there was nothing wrong with my lungs. Then a consultant thought he had cracked it: there was a cluster of nerves in my throat which was playing up. He was ever so excited as he told me, so much so that he was bouncing up and down. He sent me for a CT Scan which he hoped would confirm his diagnosis of something he had only ever seen once before and would mean that he could perform a very rare piece of delicate surgery. When, at the my next Out Patient’s appointment, the CT results failed to show any sign of the noodle that he expected he refused to even see me and sent a minion to break the “sad news”.

But the consultant did have some interesting news, which he communicated via a letter to my doctor: he thought I had something called Horner’s Syndrome