Doctor, My Eyes...

Well, I have some good news and some bad news.

The good news is that nobody's going to be sticking a needle into my eye under local anesthesia and doing anything to the lens. Really, that's good news no matter how you look at it.

The bad news is that yours truly is going to be wearing heavy duty industrial strength glasses for roughly, oh, life. Still, that doesn't seem to be very bad news when you consider the good news.

Seems that my bout of posterior iritis, or the fun things that happen when the lens of your eyeball essentially tries to escape through your pupil and, I dunno, go on a spending spree with your credit cards, gets stuck, and causes all kinds of havoc while wedged in place preventing the proper opening and closing of the iris, was caused not by a blow to the head or a nasty virus but by something altogether different: untreated astigmatism. In short, my glasses are way too weak, and they've been too weak for about three years now.

I found out all kinds of fascinating things about my eyes from this particular eye doc. One of them is that eyes, being extensions of the brain, can't help trying to see. Even when they basically can't see, they will keep trying anyway, and they will sprain themselves like a stressed hamstring if you're not careful. That's what happened to my eye. I sprained it. How embarrassing. I've sprained my ankle plenty of times, but never once did I think it was possible to sprain an eye.

I blame vanity for this particular medical misadventure. About two years ago I got a new glasses prescription that I never bothered to get filled. Why? Because they were for bifocals. Somehow my brain refused to accept that at the age of forty, I needed bifocals. That was Just Wrong. Bifocals are for old people. I, by contrast, am a spring chicken. Or at least a midsummer cave chicken. I'll let Joan explain what a cave chicken is. Suffice to say it's like a prairie chicken, only harder to find.

Actually I don't know if the bifocals would have helped matters or not. In the language of glasses, mine are about four times too weak for my eyes, and I'm not sure where my bifocals were on that scale. (Have you ever tried to read a glasses prescription? It's like trying to read a political tract in eastern Marshallese. That's a language spoken by about 40,000 people on Earth, chiefly in the Marshall Islands area of Polynesia. And never mind why I know that, it's just another little factoid I picked up along the way.)

So tomorrow I go back to the optometrist, where I get measured for new glasses. And hopefully will I get them very soon, and then this won't happen again. Meanwhile, if you have a red and angry eye combined with light sensitivity, please see your eye professional immediately. The sooner you do, the less time you will need to sit around in post-dilation shade wraps, which despite comparisons to the Terminator, look positively dorky. You have been warned.