And Now for Something Not Quite Completely Different

12 July 2010

We re-carpeted the house last week, which was a big deal, not because the new stuff feels all soft and fuzzy under our feet, but because Jack had to dismantle his library. I can't help him with this; everything is in order. He's decided to rearrange and winnow as well, so the house still looks like we just moved in.

I mention all this in order to explain the dust, and I mention the dust because I've gone and scratched my cornea again.

This time it's the left eye, and it's a doozy: 3.3 mm. It's never a good thing when the attending physician says, over the shoulder of the new intern who is peering through a lens at the fluorescein dye in my eye, "I can see it from here." And I don't even know how it happened.

So we're blaming it on the dust. Now that I've managed to scratch a cornea four times in the past three years, the doctors are thinking my corneal epithelium just doesn't have it together like it should, and that I'm going to be prone to this sort of thing for the rest of my life.

Yippee.

Despite the size of the thing, I'm not cursing like a sailor this time.

I am still in the "Ow ow ow ow" stage, which is preceded first by the "I think there's something in my eye" stage and then the "Tearing like a waterfall" stage. It was so bad last night that each time I entered into REM sleep I jolted awake in pain.

The good folks at Scheie Eye Institute are taking care of me, though. They sent me packing with a tube of antibiotic goo and will peer into my eye every day until the cut is gone.

Tomorrow I hope I'll have entered the "Jell-O" stage. That's what happens after the pain and light sensitivity are gone but the swelling makes it look as if I'm peering at the world through a bowl of milky gelatin. Which, if you think about it, I kind of am. The Jell-O takes about a day or two to go away, and then it's a good week before things are really back to normal.

During the exam today I did get a good look at Fido, who does, these days, look more like an elephant than a Siberian husky. I suppose that's progress.