symptoms and admittance

The first weirdness I noticed was one week ago, last Sunday.  We always do yoga on Sunday afternoons and my balance was totally off. I was falling all over the place. Always to the left!  I also noticed that my left eye felt like it was straining - the only way I can describe it is that when I'd move my eyes I could feel all the muscles in my left eye working to move that eyeball, it was very strange.  Also if I looked far to the left it was blurry.  After a long day of work on Monday I had total double vision.  It was a binocular issue as long as either eye was closed things were single.  Monday night I made Ben take me to Torchys for dinner - let me introduce The Roscoe (taco of the month for March! get one while you can!)

OK you knew I had go get some food in here somehow right? The evil geniuses at Torchy's have outdone themselves - waffle, fried chicken tender, bacon, fried egg side of maple syrup all wrapped up in a tortilla for easy portability.  sooo good.  we also had queso (required) and I told ben it tasted bland -symptom #3, dulled sense of taste - you  can imagine how that tortures me.  Tues and Wed were about the same, when I got up Thurs I also noticed the left side of my jaw, lips and tounge felt numb, like I had been to the dentist and the novicaine was wearing off.  Fun. 

Went to see Dr. Stonecipher my primary doc on thursday morning (we were off for easter break.) He said best case it was shingles! But zoster is hard to diagnose so we had to rule out more serious stuff like brain tumors,blood clots and MS.  So he sent me to Seton hospital ER for a full work up and MRI to check out my brain.
I'm not gonna lie, the idea of getting to see pictures of my brain was pretty exciting to this scientist. They did the full set of MRI tests - I was in the tube for about 90 minutes!  Pictures were cool except for the little bright spot on the right side of my thalamus that shouldn't be there.The arrow points to the thalamus, it's not my thalamus that's Wikipedia's thalamus, but you can see that it's in a pretty inaccessible part of the brain, way down there in the center.So yeah in my right thalamus there is a lesion,  an abnormality,  something that shouldn't be there in this most important relay center in the brain that controls just about everything.  The ER docs and neurologists didn't know what it was and the options were not very appealing - infection (unlikely because i had no other signs), tumor or MS.  They needed to admit me to the hospital for more tests and to start some occupational and physical therapy to be sure I could get around on my own.