A new experience...

Wore glasses today -- this was fine, except for stairs.  My eyes have not acclimatized to glasses yet and stairs cause a wicked shift in perception.  Imagine if when you went to step down, the stair suddenly moved six inches in.  You'd miss pretty hard.  Yeah -- fortunately I knew this going in so I held the railing on the "easy" stairs at home.  For the "hard" stairs at the GO station and at work, I just took my glasses off.  hahaha a cheat, perhaps, but effective.

So once I made it there, this morning was all kinds of productive at work.  Which is good cause this afternoon I had to leave to go see an eye specialist.  Have been having an issue for several months now, and my optometrist couldn't see anything causing it so she booked me in with the specialist.

This was a process...

I show up and the waiting room is packed and *hot*.  Awesome.  And the youngest person there is probably in their 60s.  The man in front of me gave his birthday as 1930.   Several people there my parents' age or older who were with their parents.  Hmmmm "which one of these things is not like the other...?"

Okay fine -- go sign in and fill in paperwork.  A few minutes later someone comes out, asks my birthday, "checks the tension" of my eyes -- which felt like a burst of air in my eye, and put drops in.  They were definitely less pleasant but the sensation went away in a few seconds.

A few minutes later I was called into a room where they asked my birthday and did a few eye tests -- still wearing glasses.  The drops were starting to kick in so my vision was iffy at best, but so be it.

Back to the waiting room.

Another while which was fairly entertaining as the most loud, foul-mouthed, elderly woman I've ever seen was making all kinds of a scene.  The expressions on the faces of people watch was sort of entertaining -- nobody seemed to know quite what to make of this.

Regardless, eventually I got called into another room where they asked my birthday and took pictures of my eyes before sending me back to the waiting room.

At this point there was only one room left I hadn't been in, so I had high hopes I might be almost through the game.

Into another room where they -- you guessed it, asked my birthday.   Okay - I had to ask ;)   Apparently they have such high turnover at this place that they've had incidents of multiple patients with the same name or patients just mishearing and responding to somebody else's name.  Okay - makes sense.  Tells me there's not a lot (read 'any') time being spent on relationship building...  hahhaa throughout the whole thing the process was very well organized and efficient but definitely cold.  I never got the impression questions would be welcome.

The doctor joined me momentarily -- the first person to actually introduce himself.  He shined a nasty bar light into my eye and squished the eyeball all around.  Not actually painful but reasonably unpleasant.  Lots of look "left/right/up/down" commands -- none of which I could actually execute since I actually couldn't see a thing (keep in mind, the drops had already made my eyes light sensitive before shining the light into it), and had very little control over them.  But I tried to follow the rules.

At first he said he could see what was causing the shadow and it was unusual but not tragic and would go away in probably a few weeks.  And then, not so much.   Apparently behind the issue that was causing the shadow was a hole in my retina.  One that was too large to be repaired via laser.  Boooo.  He said he'd call his surgeon partner and get me an appointment for tomorrow.   Ummmm okay.

I managed to get in a quick question -- after this surgery, would I still be a candidate for Lasik?  I'd heard not...   Apparently yes -- will take a couple years to heal fully but after that good to go.  Woohoo!  I'll be asking the same question of the surgeon tomorrow -- hopefully to the same answer :)

So got home and went to call my boss -- only to realize I didn't have her number on my phone.  Signed into work to find her number (now stored on my phone) and left her a vmail.   Did a quick check of my email -- which was fairly challenging since one eye was out of order and the other was only 1/2 working (they put drops in both eyes but the healthy one didn't seem to get as much in).

Regardless, managed to get messages to those who needed to know what was going on, cancel or reschedule all of tomorrow's meetings, and hand off the couple things that needed to happen before tomorrow before I gave up and shut down the machine.  My boss called me back and was all kinds of supportive -- all good since one of the meetings I had to move was my review *sigh*   Classic eh?

So with that organized, talked to some people and did some googling.  All say the surgery is routine and not terribly painful.  But the two weeks-a month of not being able to do *anything* physical is going to be a challenge.  FINALLY back on a roll and starting to feel well again, and now nope.  Frig.  For both me and Lexi.

It did, however, provide one and likely two days of blog fodder ;)   There's a plus everywhere if you're creative enough to find it...