Back On The Heat Wave [en]

[fr] L'oeil qui voyait trouble? Pas un coup de soleil, mais un mini corps étranger métallique. Oui, ouille. J'en ai monstre marre de voir flou de mon oeil dominant, juste là.

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.

heat wave 2015

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”.

One thought on “Back On The Heat Wave [en]

  1. You have no clue how much I understand you 😀
    I use only one eye, the left one. The right one is not “dominated”, it’s “on permanent strike” (and hence, I have no perception of depth)

    Last Friday, I had a nap in the wind, my contact lens went out and dried a little bit. Because it was Friday, because I had no spare one, I made the mistake to clean it and put it back on, thinking it was re-hydrated enough. And in the evening, I started to have pain, which I immediately identified as “tiny scratch on the cornea” (been there already).

    So removed the lens, and went to my back up glasses… to discover they had heavily suffered from a brutal with contact with unidentified whatever heavy, and they actually missed the right glass and branch.

    So headed to the optician to make a new one in emergency ( I somehow can use them, but they are not well positioned and it tires my eye a lot), and they did not want to make new glasses with a four years old prescription so… to make it short, I have my new glasses tomorrow 🙂

    In the first case, the doctor prescribed a balm to heal the scar, at night, and eye drops to water the eye, and to be honest, normal vision came back very quickly, it was a matter of two or three days.

    In between, I used one of these huge magnifying glasses women use to cross stitch : you can hang them on the neck, they are pretty easy to put at the right distance, and large enough to see a good part of the screen. And not really expensive !

    I feel awfully disabled when I can’t see well. But it has happened to me several times, so I don’t stress anymore (the first time I got such a problem with my lenses, I was in real panic) . It’s painful, but it comes back really well.

    What I do also, when it starts to hurt, is to close the eye with a patch of fabric and tape. It’s not hurt anymore by the light, and it has to stay closed, which helps.

    (And of course, this week I had a lot of coding to do, which is really difficult)

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