Tag: heat

It was much cooler up in the mountains. Here I am in Lausanne, with another heat wave hitting us. Or the same. I don’t know anymore, this summer has been endless days in survivor mode trying to keep my flat cool. The largest part of my flat faces southwest. As soon as it gets warmer outside than inside, I close everything. I close the blinds so the sun doesn’t heat my rooms through the windows. And late in the evening, when the temperature has dropped a few degrees, and the outside air is finally cooler than inside, I open everything wide.

No ceiling fans or AC here. Swiss buildings are designed to keep the cold out.

Remember the fuzzy vision I told you about a few days ago? Wednesday morning I headed over to Lausanne’s eye hospital. I spent most of the morning there. The fun bit is that I got to see two young doctors doing their internship. They were very friendly and relaxed, went through all the preliminary questions, examined my eye, tinkered with the devices in the room (they usually saw patients in another room, they explained, and weren’t familiar with this one), and then went to present my case to the doctor supervising them, who then saw me to close the case.

Turns out it wasn’t too much sun. Oh no. It was a speck of metal dust stuck in my eye, right in the middle. Tiny, a fifth of a millimetre or something. My first reaction was “OMG metal in my eye”, followed straight behind by “OMGOMG you’re going to have to remove it!” The doctor reassured me that this was something they did many times a day and was no big deal.

A few drops of anaesthetic in my eye, some deep breaths (well, I tried, at least) and clenched hands on the handles in front of me, staring straight ahead with my other eye, straight ahead, very important not to move, straight ahead… and that was it. He scraped out the nasty little thing from my eye. Oh, and a tiny layer of my cornea, too, he explained. (Luckily I’ve had enough feline eye adventures with Sir Quintus that this didn’t alarm me. But still.)

So, now I’m left with gooey antibiotic drops (we don’t want an infection there) and still-blurry vision. It’s really making reading (on-screen or off-screen) difficult and frustrating. The blurry eye is my dominant eye, otherwise it wouldn’t be so bad. It still hurts a bit at night, but hopefully the pain should go away in a few short days. I don’t know about the timeline for the blurry vision, and it’s starting to distress me. The nurse on the hotline suggested I give it the week-end and come around on Monday if it was still bad. At this stage what’s going through my mind is “I hope I get all my vision back at some point” and “I hope it doesn’t take too long, because it’s starting to impact my ability to work”.