I got a fairly quick dx (only a year) after my eye problem started, and MRI showed lesions when a doctor finally gave me one, my first, and Visual Evoked Responses (have you have these VER's? They are easy to do an relatively inexpensive). the first doctor I saw after I got double vision, pain, and double vision was an opthalmologist who just said there was nothing wrong with me. I sat in his office and screamed because this was, now a severe symptom after more than thirty years of other symptoms. Nobody paid any attention to my screams, as if I were not there. I was on Maui where we often spent vacations.
Later, in Seattle, I had the positive MRI and the positive VER's (although I have no idea if the MRI was in a visual area), so the the doctor (a GP in practice with a neurologist) just said "I think you have MS". As I say, only a year to get that dx after over thirty years of symptoms.
My ON lasted for 8 years. The neuro opthalmologist I saw at that time didn't think steroids increased healing of ON. I patched the eye, covered the TV set so I could listen and not watch, stopped going to movies, always wore a hat outside to block light, and these things helped. Also, I then saw Dr. Swank and he put me on the radical low fat diet and that helped. I was still having double vision and a drooped lid when I finally was completely healed in a prayer service, suddenly and unexpectedly. I say this not because all healing services produce such results--but my neuro opthalmologist had before and after pictures of my drooping eyelid, and he had no reason for the sudden cure. I had many years of perfect eyesight, until I got hit by forest fire smoke here in Los Alamos. This smoke-eye situation has been so bad that I have to evacuate, at great expense, every time it happens. My eyes roll back in my head in spasm, and I cannot see at all for ten minutes, during that problem with smoke. Many tests done, opthalmologist says eyes are not the cause, nerves in the brain (or whatever she means by "what is behind the eyes" is the cause.
I also have Porphyria, so it's never certain which of my disease caused these problems.
Just describing what happened.
One symptom I did share with others on this list was that I had poor color vision on tests, some years before dx and some years before ON.