All the Billion Other Moments

You may be wondering where I’ve been. Ok, probably not, but leave me my illusions.

It’s a long one, so read on if you want to know

A few weeks ago, I woke up, went down stairs, logged into work and began reading my email. I soon noticed that I couldn’t. Why? Because I was seeing three of everything. After a few minutes I realized that my right eye wouldn’t focus. I took off my glasses and tried to read something up close (I don’t were glasses to read), but that didn’t seem to work either. I tried flushing my eye with water. I tried ignoring it. No good! I was going blind!

I remained calm, and called the free dial-a-nurse provided by my insurance (one of the only things left that no longer costs me an arm and a leg I might add). I explained that I woke up and my eye would not focus.

“Did you get hit in the eye?”

“No”

“Did you hit your head?”

“No”

“That’s not good. Go to the emergency room.”

So after trying a number of people, my grandfather drove up to take me to the ER (thanks Grampy). No one was there when I arrived so I was registered right away. Thats when everyone in the area had an emergency. I sat in the waiting room trying not to look at anything, because by now it hurt to try to focus. An hour or so later, I was called in.

Everyone seemed greatly amused by my problem, but that could be my fault. I kept a good humor about it, and tried not to be worried. After all, the worst that could be happening was I was going blind, and what good would worrying have done about that? The ER could find nothing wrong and they referred me to an eye doctor.

Home I went, and then right back out to the eye doctor (thanks again Grampy). After many more tests, they just gave me an eye exam. My prescription was wrong. Either my eye changed drastically overnight (unlikely) or I had been wearing the wrong prescription for over a year. My eyes had compensated until they just plain gave up. I ordered new glasses and spent the rest of the day in complete darkness to let my eyes rest up.

Two weeks later, I had new glasses and was all set.

Last Thursday I came downstairs, logged into work, read my email with my new eyes. When I got up to eat breakfast I collapsed to the floor in pain. My back was not right. I had been having back pain on and off for some time, but this was new. I could not get up for some time.

Apparently I have a weak back muscle causing my spine to come out of alignment, which in turn in causing other issues, and that leads to pain. I’ll start physical therapy on Thursday. I’m supposed to stop taking the pain killers today, so we’ll see how I feel tomorrow.

All of this happens while I’m really trying to make a strong effort to write 700+ words a day on my book, and just after my insurance turned in to a mere shadow of it’s former self. It’s a new ‘fairer’ version where it costs more to do everything except have the insurance itself. This only penalizes those who actually use the insurance.

Share This

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 15th, 2005 at 10:52 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.