Meet Vivien, our first #WarriorOfTheWeek of 2021! Hear about how she found out she had #VisualSnow and what it’s like to live with 2 neurological illnesses. ????????
Spotlight on: Vivien Wendel ????
“Hey guys, my name’s Vivi. My Visual Snow Syndrome started in April 2020. While chatting with a friend, I started noticing some static on the walls behind her. As I was having a rough day so far, I decided to simply ignore it and thought it was due to being stressed out. Unfortunately, it turned out that this symptom came to stay and after 3 or 4 weeks even more sensations accumulated and manifested themselves, like afterimages, photophobia, oscillopsia, excessive floaters and tinnitus.
I also suffer from Multiple Sclerosis, but neurologists ruled it out as the root cause and an ophthalmologist was unable to find any abnormalities regarding my eyeballs. That’s how I got my diagnosis and ultimately an explanation for the changes and decline in vision.
Living with two neurological illnesses at the same time for which there is no cure can be super frustrating and it took months for me to come to terms with it. Luckily, managing the symptoms of both MS and VSS is pretty similar to each other and as a result, I wasn’t confronted with a lot of changes in my daily routines.
To cope with my symptoms I try to get around 8 hours of sleep every night, manage my stress through exercise and meditation, stick to a healthy diet and use a blue light filter on my electronic devices while sleep deprivation and stress seem to worsen them. At night, my vision is extremely impaired, but it got easier over the last months to ignore the static during daytime.
Still, it seems to me that my VSS is progressing and so I hope that treatment will be available in the future!”
