Stress and travel

All right, time for an update.

After wrapping up a particularly intense travel month for work (October) I woke up a few weeks ago with a small, odd distortion in my left eye. I didn't pay it much mind for a few days until I saw a work report that was supposed to have text in a box had a warped corner in the lower right instead of a right angle. Being a big fan of right angles in boxes, I took this as a sign that something wasn't right and went into my eye doctor. Having lived near the Mississippi and Ohio River valley most of my life, with numerous visits to both, I am among the 62% of people in that area who have a condition called POHS - basically a fungal infection of the retina. Most of the time it doesn't effect vision, but on occasion issues will pop up.

So I went in and spend the next 2 hours having my eyes dilated* and being put through a barrage of tests that in retrospect must be illegal under some convention. Picture bring exposed to flash photography from 1 inch away for 15 minutes straight. Yeah, kinda sucks. Then the eye doctor showed me the test results and told me something was definitely not right so she referred me to a retinal specialist in the next suburb, went to get a card, and came back into the room *with* the retinal specialist she was referring me to!**.

The specialist looked at my eye and agreed that more tests were needed. So I followed her over to her office where they used the special dye to reveal bloodflow in the retina and make sure there weren't any wayward blood vessels growing where they shouldn't. There weren't, but there was some odd inflammation in the area. So after 4 hours of tests (fully dialated the entire time) I was done and was sent off to the Walgreens to pick up an order for steroids to reduce the swelling. It's a first attempt, and the doctor is optimistic because we caught it so early and there are a lot of options for treatment at this point beyond the steroids. As it is it hasn't been so bad. My neck hasn't swelled up like Barry Bonds' at *all*!

I've got a followup appointment later this week where we'll see what progress has been made. Honestly it doesn't seem like much at this point, but we'll see. I'll keep ya'll updated.

------------RADICAL TOPIC CHANGE ALERT--------------

Regardless of what happens with the eye I'm leaving this weekend for a week with the GF in MAUI! We have good friends who are doing the "destination wedding" and we decided to go and make a vacation out of it. And frankly, it's gone swimmingly! Apparently, Hawaii is *dying* for tourists to come because nobody is going there at the moment, so you can get great deals on airfare and hotels and it's not crowded! So TOWWAS, maybe you need to go to Hawaii to research for the knitting book?

Anyway, we've got all sorts of adventures planned for while we're gone. I'll post pictures while we're there so ya'll can keep up! WOOOO, MAUI WOWIE!

* MULTIPLE times.
** I KNOW! What are the odds the specialist was just stopping by to followup on a different referral case?

Comments

towwas said…
Wow, that eye thing is fascinating! And I've never heard of it!