Today’s been busy, at least by my standards.
This morning, I went to see Doctor McKay, my eye doctor. I get the feeling Doctor Vaezi, my previous eye guy, is too successful and important for West Coast Retinal Consultants out here in Richmond.
But don’t let the name fool you. They do the rest of the eye too.
It was the usual long process of actually getting to see him. Show up, check in, sit in the waiting room. Get the dilation drops put in. Sit back down in the waiting room. Get back up for the imaging of my eyes in various forms.
There seems to be three forms. I know one of them is to map the blood vessels in my eyes, but I dunno about the other two.
Maybe they just want to capture the sparkling depths of my baby blues.
Then there’s the testing. You know, can you read these letters. I got further than before with that at least with my right eye because when it got tough, I gave myself three or four seconds to just stare at the letters as my eye gathered enough information and the letters slowly resolved themselves.
I hope that did not throw off the measurements. My changing tactics.
Anyhow, then it was more waiting until I got called into the exam room, where I waited a bunch more before my ocular specialist Doctor McKay showed up to consult.
Impressively, he remembered me and what he’d worked on before, which was that blood vessel issue in my left eye. He asked about it, I told him it was fine.
Well, not really. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that the swelling was a lot worse in my left eye, which of the two appears to be the troublemaker.
And that meant it was time for an injection. Yay. He literally stuck a needle in my eye.
But they have new, sharper needles, and he probably remembered that I seem to be somewhat resistant to the numbing agent they use, so he was all slick with putting a drop of the numbant (sic) in my eye and doing the injection all in one motion.
Very impressive technique. Kinda hot, in fact.
Well, I did have a handsome blonde doctor stick SOMEthing in me.
Anyhow, it hurt, but it hurt a lot less than previous shots to the eye. Hooray for sharper needles and skilled doctors.
I will be back there next Monday at 11 am for a shot in the right eye. After that, the shots will be repeated every six weeks until the swelling is gone.
Fair enough. Whatever it takes to retain my eyesight.
After that, we headed over to wound care, and that’s when my troubles began because despite all the time I spent sitting and waiting, my legs were still incredibly tired just from getting to West Coast Retina Consultants and moving around there, so even just getting up the elevator to the clinic was very tiring.
What’s worse is that I really needed to pee.
Luckily, I had the time to do it. Unluckily, I stupidly chose to use a urinal instead of doing the sensible thing and sitting down to pee in one of the stalls.
This, of course, involved standing for a long-ish period and my legs do not like this. There were, thankfully, grab bars on either side of the urinal.
But my pee decided to come out at a very weird angle and that meant I had to use one hand to hold my instrument and achieve any level of accuracy.
Foreskins can be such a pain.
Anyhow, all that conspired to make it so that when I finally sat down in the waiting area I was in agony. I was breathing so hard and in such obvious distress that the old people in the waiting area with me felt bad for me.
Luckily, by the time I was called in to get my bandages changed, my endorphins had caught up with me so my legs were now somewhat numb.
Still very tired, but at least the pain was mostly gone.
Needless to say, after all that righteous suffering, I felt I had earned a vanilla cone from McD’s on the way home.
Thus ended today’s adventure.
Oh, and the bug people were here while I was gone. So, phew on that.
More after the break.
Now there’s an image
I just realized how potentially creepy the phrase “the bug people” could be.
Oh, update on last night’s “cold” : it comes and goes. Which is very weird. Sometimes I feel like I’m on the edge of pneumonia and sometimes it’s almost gone. All that’s left behind is a bit of a dry throat.
It seems to be linked to my hydration level, at least partially. I’ve known for a while that because of how Jardiance works, it makes your urinary system work pretty hard and hence also depletes your hydration level pretty fast.
And I am trying to break myself of the habit of procrastinating on getting up and refilling my water glass. That is the number one cause of me ending up dehydrated and it has to stop or shit like this “cold” will keep happening.
I wish my body had a diagnostics panel I could check to see what my levels of various things are so I could top up (or cut back) when needed.
Oh well, maybe someday. We already have things like blood sugar sensors you can implant in your arm and read with an app, so once that kind of thing goes through a few more evolutionary cycles, maybe we’ll all be able to get a “health chip”.
It’s always bugged me that there’s no easy way to tell what vitamins you need. Even a medical lab would have to run a TON of tests to figure out the levels for every nutrient.
Maintaining your body should be as easy as maintaining your car.
“Seems I am low on Vitamin A, calcium, and brake fluid. ”
Imagine how much healthier people would be!
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.