Let me tell you something that may shock and surprise you: having lasers fired directly into your eye is not a fun thing.

I know, I know. Lasers. It sounds so cool. Star Wars and James Bond and so on. But surprisingly it’s not very cool at all.

Yes, I was at the hospital today to have my eyes checked out. And the changes in my eyes are quite severe apparently, so it was straight to lasers. Well, first there was a medical student who wanted me to take part in a project he was doing. He was going to film my eye. Find a blood vessel and see how it reacts when the blood pressure rises. Or something like that. I agreed to do it, because it might help others with sight problems in the future. And I would like that. But unfortunately I’m so nearsighted that the machine couldn’t get a good enough shot of the blood vessels. So after spending quite a long time staring into that machine while the med student tried to calibrate it, we had to give up. He thanked me repeatedly for the effort and for wanting to participate. A nice guy.

And then I went back to the senior doc and he shot lasers into my eyes. I didn’t expect the treatment to get started right away. And I was picturing some kind of elaborate laser cannon machine and me lying down and complex things. But I just sat in the chair and he fired it off and it was over in a minute. It wasn’t nice at all, it was worse than that test where they fire jets of air into your eyes. But at least it didn’t last long. Afterwards I couldn’t see anything on the right eye. Because it interferes with your vision they only do one eye at a time. And because of the severe changes in my eyes I’m going to need 3-4 treatments on each eye. So it’ll be a while. But at least it should stop it getting worse. And maybe make my sight a little better. If I’m lucky.

At least I can see now again. The blindness only lasted a minute or so. After that it was just blurry. It’s fairly back to normal now I think. Normal being still blurry for me of course. But I can read at least. I’m going back on Tuesday for the next treatment.

AFter the hospital business was done I stopped at the playground. Checked in on the goats. Gave them some old carrots. When I buy carrots I usually don’t manage to eat them all before they start to go bad. But they don’t go so bad that the goats don’t love them.

I also met Muhammed. The boy I “saved from drowning” once. He walked with me from the bus to the playground. Seemed happy to see me. He asked me why I never come to the playground anymore. I told him I did. I just usually come so early that the kids aren’t around yet. I guess I should try to be there a little later sometimes. The kids are good company too. He asked me if I was feeding the animals on Saturday. I confirmed that I was and he said that maybe he’d stop by and help out. He can be a bit of a rascal sometimes, but a nice kid. It still puzzles me when people are actually happy to see me and want me around and maybe even like me a little. I see myself as more of an ogre to be villified and scorned. You know.

When I came home I was very, very tired. And seeing poorly. I ended up going to bed. And have actually slept for something like 5-6-7 hours. I’m probably not going to sleep much tonight then. But oh well. I needed the rest.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 12th, 2008 at 0:27 and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.