WDIV's Ruth Spencer was off the air 2 1/2 months last fall. Back at work, she still has no idea what her ailment was all about.
Doctors don't know.
In a piece aired Monday night, Spencer talks to WDIV's Dr. Frank McGeorge about the mystery and living with uncertainty.
She says it started Oct. 23.
"When I woke up that morning, I had a change in my vision out of my left eye," Spencer said. "It was sort of as though I was looking through a forest fire haze."
Spencer said she thought she had gotten some face cream in her eye, but she thought she'd play it safe and see an eye doctor the next day.
On her way home from work, she stopped at Party City to pick up goods for a gathering she was hosting for her "Ruth to the Rescue" volunteers.
"I'm going down the aisle looking at paper plates and paper cups and what not, and all of a sudden I start to see . . . the view that I'm looking at is kind of crossing like that," Spencer said. "Some white flashlights, and that goes on for probably one-thousand one, one-thousand two, one-thousand three, lights out. That's it."
The next thing she remembers is waking up in an ambulance headed to Beaumont Hospital.
People who were with her "have more memory of what happened to me that night than I do," Spencer says "One of my friends said, 'You were really pretty out of it. They were asking you questions that you should know the answers to.' Stuff like, I don't know, What month is this?"
They ran tests. After two days, she was released without a diagnosis. She was told not to drive for six months.
Spencer says of her ailment: "It's a mystery, and that I do not like. I didn't have the answer that I needed, and I feel like I need that answer because I'm a person who likes to be in control."
"Sometimes, stuff happens and you have to be grateful that it wasn't worse. You have to move on with your life and be brave," Spencer says.
