I had a day off work sick today - I think the first I've taken in four years, and very welcome, especially by two in the afternoon when I should have been starting my upper-level class but was instead free to doze off. I was feeling much better by then, or I wouldn't have appreciated it so much.
I remember a little discomfort when I put my contact lenses in yesterday, but by the time I took them out in the evening my right eye had become quite red. It proceeded to get more red and sore through the night, and this morning I found that looking at my computer screen, glancing towards my still-curtained windows, looking at the screen of my cellphone, and anything else involving light caused me pain. I rang my medical provider. It's a very irritating system: you phone their central line, they ask you what is wrong and who you want to see, and then they take your number and tell you that the clinic will phone you. Last year I had a friend who had more than one serious medical emergency, and I experienced the frightening inefficiency of this system. This morning I sat around for an hour waiting for the clinic of my "family doctor" to phone me back, and then I gave up and phoned ophthalmology direct. They saw me half an hour later, so not everything is broken. They were also friendly and efficient. It's just that first bit of the process that frustrates me every time. I hope I don't have to deal with such a system at the end of my life. In the past couple of days I've been watching a Romanian film, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, in which the aging and lonely Lazarescu is taken from hospital to hospital through a long night, slipping towards death as he goes because no-one except the ambulance woman will take responsibility for him. It's not like that here once you get into the system (at least if you have insurance), but actually getting into it sometimes seems quite difficult.
In any case, I learned that I was suffering from iritis, one of those things you never hear of until you have it. It seems to me it should be called irisitis, since iritis sounds like a kind of chronic uncontrollable anger. It really means, of course, that my iris is inflamed. Coming home on my bike in the bright Colorado sunshine was quite unpleasant - it developed into the head/brow-ache they'd told me people usually complained of. But, here is the wonder of modern medecine: three doses of the hourly eye-drops later and everything felt much better - redness fading, sensitivity decreasing. I was a little worried that I was going to go back to work tomorrow looking so entirely well that no-one would believe there had been anything wrong. However, I also have eye-drops to use twice a day to dilate the pupil in that eye, so actually I'm going to be looking a bit strange for the next few days.
I remember a little discomfort when I put my contact lenses in yesterday, but by the time I took them out in the evening my right eye had become quite red. It proceeded to get more red and sore through the night, and this morning I found that looking at my computer screen, glancing towards my still-curtained windows, looking at the screen of my cellphone, and anything else involving light caused me pain. I rang my medical provider. It's a very irritating system: you phone their central line, they ask you what is wrong and who you want to see, and then they take your number and tell you that the clinic will phone you. Last year I had a friend who had more than one serious medical emergency, and I experienced the frightening inefficiency of this system. This morning I sat around for an hour waiting for the clinic of my "family doctor" to phone me back, and then I gave up and phoned ophthalmology direct. They saw me half an hour later, so not everything is broken. They were also friendly and efficient. It's just that first bit of the process that frustrates me every time. I hope I don't have to deal with such a system at the end of my life. In the past couple of days I've been watching a Romanian film, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, in which the aging and lonely Lazarescu is taken from hospital to hospital through a long night, slipping towards death as he goes because no-one except the ambulance woman will take responsibility for him. It's not like that here once you get into the system (at least if you have insurance), but actually getting into it sometimes seems quite difficult.
In any case, I learned that I was suffering from iritis, one of those things you never hear of until you have it. It seems to me it should be called irisitis, since iritis sounds like a kind of chronic uncontrollable anger. It really means, of course, that my iris is inflamed. Coming home on my bike in the bright Colorado sunshine was quite unpleasant - it developed into the head/brow-ache they'd told me people usually complained of. But, here is the wonder of modern medecine: three doses of the hourly eye-drops later and everything felt much better - redness fading, sensitivity decreasing. I was a little worried that I was going to go back to work tomorrow looking so entirely well that no-one would believe there had been anything wrong. However, I also have eye-drops to use twice a day to dilate the pupil in that eye, so actually I'm going to be looking a bit strange for the next few days.
