Blind as Love

I am going blind, or at least I thought I was. For months now, my eyes have been giving me problems. I had initially attributed it to my contact lenses, and the fact that I haven’t been sleeping as well I wanted, and those two together, well, they are quite a recipe for some major eyestrain. But it was turning out to be some really horrible eyestrain. Not only were my eyes almost constantly red, and tearing up, but it began to have this really grainy feel, like someone had just poured and embedded sand onto my eyes. Add to that, my vision started getting cloudy as if a heavy fog had descended all around me. And it didn’t make any difference whether I was wearing any corrective lenses or not.

It had gotten embarrassingly bad last week while I was having lunch with mystery man (see previous entries), um…let’s just call him Hugh. And he asks, “what’s with the (dark) glasses?” I told him it was all red from eyestrain, and proceeded to take my glasses off. What I didn’t know, as I was to find out later on when I visited the ladies’ room, my eyes were R-E-D, big time. I looked like 1) a woman possessed; 2) high on drugs; or 3) the devil himself. But not only were they red, my eyes actually hurt.

A good friend, who, I have a sneaking suspicion, is a hypochondriac, offers me a diagnosis: “I think you have glaucoma.” I looked up the symptoms, and I do have some (or most) of the symptoms. So…that explains it…but wait, what do you mean, it can lead to permanent loss of sight? And there is nothing I can absolutely do from going blind?!

I panicked, I couldn’t breathe. The prospect of not seeing anything at all, much less myself (yes, I am a narcissist) was something I simply could not accept. It scared me the living daylights out of me.

But there is hope, since I have only self-diagnosed, maybe the doctor would tell me otherwise. And he did. It was…keratitis. In layman’s terms, my corneas were badly inflamed, and it was causing all my symptoms, including the cloudy vision. Apparently, I was the fourth person that week to seem him for the exact same condition. It seems to be the de rigueur as far as eye infections go, and my wearing of contact lenses had only helped to worsen it.

The doctor says it takes a while for this condition to go away, six to eight weeks at the minimum. I can’t wear my contacts, meaning I get to play hot librarian everyday (I wish!). And I get to slather about a mountain-load of gels and drops on my eyes…nice. But yeah, I guess this is much better than the alternative, so I’m just gonna have to suck it up.

The most frustrating part in all of these is that my condition didn’t have to reach this state if the first doctor I had gone to when my symptoms first presented itself actually diagnosed me right. But no, there wasn’t anything wrong with my eyes, he said, short of telling me that everything was just in my head. Stupid f*cker.

And I guess, this is my point. We are what we do, and vice versa. We could be doctors, writers, waiters, or what have you, and if we couldn’t live up to that function, and be really crappy about it, then it doesn’t really tell much about us, does it?