SRUTHI: Okay. So this is a story about a woman whose body started breaking down in increasingly weird ways. It's as if her body turns into a David Lynch movie, and there's nothing she can do to understand it, and nothing she can do to convince people it's real. For the purposes of the story, we will call this woman "Hope." And it all starts last year. Hope is 29, living in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. And one beautiful winter morning…
HOPE: I was walking at a soccer field that's near my house when I first noticed, "Well that feels weird, my eye feels such a weird nagging eye pressure. Almost like my eye was bulging a little bit, from the inside out.
SRUTHI: It's so bad that she feels as if people can see it, like it's bulging so much, this one eye.
PJ: Can she, like if she stands in front of the bathroom mirror and stares at her face, can she feel like she can see her eye bulging?
SRUTHI: No. So it goes on for a couple of weeks, doesn't go away. And then she says you know what, I'm just gonna have this looked at.
HOPE: I actually just went to the eye doctor that's in Walmart, and she looked at my eye, and she didn't find anything at all wrong with the eye. The eye was perfectly healthy and normal.
SRUTHI: This bulging feeling, it goes on for a whole month. And then one day, she wakes up and it's gone.
HOPE: This would, be I should say this, this would be something in my life that I would probably never give a second thought to, this mild eye problem that I had for a month, if… what happened next hadn't happened.
SRUTHI: It's evening. Hope is working. She's a wedding photographer, and she's setting up room in her house where she can meet clients.
HOPE: And all of the sudden I stood up, and I couldn't see out of my right eye. I thought, "Oh my gosh, am I having a stroke?" I had field of vision in like three-quarters of the eye, but the one quarter was completely covered by this weird zigzag freaky thing. It's almost like a kaleidoscope when you were a kid, and you used to hold up a kaleidoscope to your eye and it would… it would like shine and shimmer, like a piece of mirrored paper in there. So I actually remember waking up my sister, and she said "what are you talking about?" and I said "I can't see out of my eye, I'm freaking out."