So today was part 2 of the laser treatment.

And lemme tell you, it doesn’t get better. In fact it was worse than the first time. Mainly because it seemed to last longer this time. And this time it actually hurt sometimes. I don’t think it did the first time. That was just extreme discomfort. This time it was extreme discomort for a long time with added pain. But on the bright side, I only have to do it what 6 more times or so? Oh boy.

It really isn’t fun. You get this thing pressed up against your eye. Like a monocle. Only monocles aren’t usually shoved right in your eye. It’s really uncomfortable to have something pressed against your eyeball, you know. And so you can’t close your eye. And the machine is turned on and you see a strong, bright light. You can’t blink, you can’t avoid it. And then the lasers start. Now when you say “laser” you think of a sort of laser beam. Long beams. Like a sci-fi gun. At least that’s the image I had in my mind before I tried it. But they don’t fire long beams at you from across the room of course. You get the machine pressed right against your eye. And then you sort of see this little black dot. And it “fires” at you. It moves across your field of vision. It’s hard to describe. Most of the time it doesn’t hurt, the bad thing is more that machine pressing against your eye. But a few times it did hurt, when it got out in the peripheral parts of my vision. Imagine having red-hot needles poked into your eyeball. Not to be OVERDRAMATIC or anything. Okay, not quite as bad as that. But bad enough. Several times I thought to myself “okay, that must be it. We must be done now. Let’s wrap it up”. But he just kept going. It felt like ages, but it probably wasn’t more than 5 minutes or so. And then afterwards blindness for a couple of minutes. Blinking, lots of blinking. And light slowly dripping in. First around the edges of your eyesight. And then the world comes back. Only blurry. Much blurrier than even my normal blurriness.

I hope you will never have to experience laser treatment on your eyes. It’s not the end of the world or anything. But trust me, you’re not missing out on anything.

We did my right eye again today. I thought they’d alternate between eyes. But he said that we’d do the right eye again next time as well so I guess we keep doing that eye until it’s “done”. Or fallen out in a vain attempt to escape the torture. Ahem. My next appointment is January 13th. So there’s a while until that. But as the doctor said “that’ll give you some time to recover at least”. Oh yes.

Speaking of sight, I had a new floater this morning. In my left eye. You might remember the whole diabetes thing started with my panicking over a floater in the right eye. That one almost seems to be gone. At least much less severe. But this morning there was one on the left eye. It’s not quite as large. But very noticeable. I guess I’ll get used to that as well.

Floaters and laser treatment, they are both preferable to blindness. I have said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t think I could live with being blind. I don’t “see” it happening. If you know what I mean. Last Thursday, at my first laser treatment, I saw a blind woman in the bus. I have seen her several times. She often takes the bus in my local area. Getting in in front with her dog. And I have seen her at the playground too. She’ll come with another, older woman and a little girl. They come and talk to the animals. Even though she’s blind she still knows the animals. She knew Mads by name. I think I might actually have gone to school with her. There was a blind girl in one of the parallel classes. I think that was her. In any case, it’s amazing to see her be out and around so much. Leading her life. I wouldn’t be surprised if she gets out more often than I do. It should be inspirational, shouldn’t it? And it is to a degree. But at the end of the day, I just don’t think I could live with being blind.

Let’s hope the laser torture, I mean treatment, will prevent that then. I’m starting to fear that my eyesight won’t get better. It’s been around 6 weeks now and it’s only gotten more blurry. I don’t know. But I can live with blurry. It’s not nice, but with zoom and patience it’s not the end of the world. As long as I don’t go blind. Fingers crossed.

Tomorrow is dietician. And I’ll try to stop off at the playground on my way home. I was too tired today. It’s not easy getting home when you can barely see the busses either.

Oh and Denmark was hit by an earthquake today. That is a rare occasion. Apparently it might have been the strongest earthquake to occur since they started measuring them. It still wasn’t catastrophical though. I don’t think there were any injuries or structural damage. Just some tipped over christmas trees. I didn’t experience it myself. Too far away. The epicentre was in Sweden, so Copenhagen was hit. But not Jylland.

I can’t believe that there’s only a week till christmas now. Time sure does fly when you’re having diabetes.

Feeling somewhat better today. I said yesterday that I couldn’t control whether the days are good or bad. But that’s not quite true of course. There are things you can do. Like go outside and do something. That usually helps. It can be hard if you’re very down though.

But today I went shopping. And that was nice. Dropped off another christmas card at the post office, which will soon be closing. Checked Føtex for photos, nothing new there. And no cute girls either.

On my way home I passed some kindergartners. A couple of adults and 6-7 kids. They were coming from the opposite direction and we came to a little passway at the same time, so I had to stop and let them pass before I could go on. One little kid passed and smiled up at me and said “hello”. I said hello back to him. Then the next little kid passes and smiled at me and said “hello”. And I said hello to him. They didn’t all say hello, but four or five them did. Cute. Kindergarten kids always seem very eager to say hello to strangers. It often happens when you walk by a kindergarten, there will be kids on the other side of the fence looking out and shouting hellos. It’s too bad we have to grow up and lose that sweet, happy trusting-everybody feeling.

But it made me smile, of course. They were a cute bunch. Little different-coloured faces. It’s too bad that Gellerup gets such a bad rap. Because it can be a beautiful place. All the different nationalities, different cultures. Lots of beautiful and exciting colours and smells and sounds. It could be such a beautiful amazing place. But you can’t deny that there is trouble too. And that’s what gets the headlines of course.

It’s no wonder that integration is a hard thing to achieve. If I was a foreigner I don’t know how welcome I’d feel in Denmark. With a government that stays in power by latching on to the Xenophobia party. Did I just the other day see their leader on TV talking about how it might be time for Denmark NOT to follow the human rights convention? Wow. That made me sit back and think “is she actually saying that? And no one is asking if she’s on drugs or anything?”. And we have a ministry that misleads the public about their rights to bring family to Denmark. And then when the information comes out they jump through hoops to find some way to avoid following the EU courts. And a “Danish test” that you have to pass to become Danish, but the test has errors! That’s like.. Monty Python stuff. You can’t make that shit up. Nevermind that most born and bred Danes probably couldn’t pass the test themselves. I probably couldn’t. I suck at history. I’d fail. Not only is a test like that stupid and unfair, but it has ERRORS. I wouldn’t be surprised if we soon get armed patrol guards at our borders. With orders to shoot on sight. We’re not scaremongering, this is really happening.

But as long as we get some tax cuts then everything is fine.

Okay, enough politics. Tomorrow I have my next eye appointment. Let your lazer light shine down on me. And then Wednesday it’s back to the dietician. And next week is christmas. Busy, busy, busy.

Exercise biked: 32km.