Feeling old today. Bleh.

My eyesight is definitely getting worse. It’s getting harder and harder to read text on the TV screen. Even reading text on the monitor, which is never more than two feet from my face when I use it, is getting tricky sometimes.

So, it’s time to go see the eye doctor again. Not looking forward to that. They tend to treat people on assistance like shit. They do not take us seriously and honestly don’t really want us there because they don’t make as much money on us.

Or maybe it’s just me. I don’t know.

But eye appointments have always been tricky for me. Even my first one, when I was in Grade 1, was hard on me, because I have a very precise sense of language and the doctor is always saying “Do you like it better like this, or like this?”

And I am stuck saying “Well one is darker and one is sharper…. ” and that is totally not what they are looking for. They want a bunch of subjective snap decisions and I am not very good at those.

And you don’t get far in an eye exam saying “I dunno!” a lot.

Plus they rely heavily on that classic eye chart, which is text, and I think possibly that I have specialized, eye wise, in reading text. So the results might not be accurate.

In general, I feel like I have dealt with my poor vision by learning to force my eyes to focus. If I don’t do that, everything looks dull and blurry. Even with my glasses on.

I suspect that I have a very long term case of lazy eye. Long term as in, since that first eye appointment. I think I had one eye focusing better than the other and it was misdiagnosed as myopia.

And since then, I have been masking that from the world and from myself by forcing my eyes to focus.

It’s just a theory, though. Could be way off base.

More worrisome(because, of course, I’ve had poor eyesight for my whole life) is my hearing. That seems to be deteriorating as well lately. And I seem to be losing it at the low end, which surprises me. I always thought the high end went first.

But I find it harder and harder to make out low sounds. I have a bunch of samples of the type I used to make music that are now too low for me to hear reliably. Even with the headphones on.

And some of my mp3s have starting to sound… strange. Like someone ran them through a low-pass filter and filtered out the low end of the song. Basslines sound incomplete, like there’s notes missing.

So far, it’s no big deal. But I don’t like the way that this is going.

So I guess it’s time to see my GP as well. It could me just the usual sinus mess that is causing this. Fluid in the ear. But that usually causes the occasional annoying high pitched noise in my ear that lasts for maybe five seconds and is gone. It has never attacked the low end at all, as far as I know.

And ears are a lot harder to deal with than eyes. We have correcting vision pretty much down pat by now. But you can’t get a pair of glasses for your ears.

None worth wearing, anyhow.

So it might be that I will have to decide when it is time for a hearing aid. Right now, the occasional inability to understand low speech or low music is not much of a problem.

But if I start needing people to shout before I can understand what they are saying, I will have no choice but to get a hearing aid. Or deal with the world through text entirely.

That would suck. Hard to deal with people on the street that way, you know? What do you do, hand them a pen and paper?

But what has me very worried is my breathing. I have been having episodes of shortness of breath lately. Times when I have to apply my breathing techniques (holding my breath, breathing fast, forcing all the air from my lungs) with considerable vigor in order to get things back to something like normal.

It has to be the sleep apnea. It kind of doesn’t go away when ignored. The sleep apnea must be reducing my lung capacity like it did with a friend of mine. I need to get back on CPAP, or maybe tell my GP that CPAP doesn’t work for me and see what comes next.

I suspect it will be surgical.

Or maybe they have new gear that is way, way better than my CPAP machine. Lighter mask, quieter operation. I saw a video on YouTube of a gizmo that supposedly does everything a CPAP machine does but is just a little rechargeable doohickey that looks like that thing that Bajorans have on their nose and just sits on your nose, wirelessly.

I could live with that, I think. It wouldn’t be covering my face and making me feel (quite irrationally) like I am being smothered. I am sure I could get used to it being there as I slept, as long as it was attached firmly enough that I can move around in bed without it falling off.

The big barrier to telling all this to my GP is, of course, that I would have to admit to my GP that I have been letting my CPAP machine gather dust for like five years now. Not an easy thing to admit.

My therapist, at least, would understand how that can happen with my particular strain of depression. I deal with whatever I can deal with, and everything else gets ignored. That way, I can keep going.

And for some reason, I absolutely have to keep going. My life might not be much, but I have to keep doing it.

I feel like if I was to stop…. I’d die.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.