After my eye exam, I walked out of the doctor’s office and into a blaze
of full summer sun, amplified a zillion times because my pupils were cranked to
the max and my vintage Transition lenses barely darken at all anymore.
Augh!
Literally blind, eyes streaming despite the lame shade of my hand, I
bumbled my way back to work by cutting through malls and the View Street
parkade. Gaining the sanctity of my office, I immediately dimmed the lights. I
sat in the dark for a few minutes, then decided to post the eyeball pic on my
F***book page to make my misery selectively public.
Co-workers started coming to see how I was doing. Our office manager
stood silhouetted in my doorway and asked if I recognized her voice. “I’m
blind, not deaf!” I snapped, trying not to laugh. My program cohort told me
that my eyes were creeping her out and maybe I should just go home. “Can’t,” I
replied. “I have a coffee date in an hour.”
Surely my pupils will relax by then.
Wrong-o. The only reason I got to the café alive was by falling in with
a gang of tourists as they crossed the street. I stayed with them down the
block to where my coffee buddy stood on the corner, waving like a lunatic when
she spotted my work clothes in the shorts-and-tank crowd. I don’t remember much
about the conversation except that it distracted me from how frikking bright
everything was, and when just before we parted, I leaned in to ask if my pupils
looked any smaller. She peered close, then gave a rueful smile and shook her
head. Great. My return route was directly into the sun. Walking downtown with
your eyes almost completely closed—actually, my left eye was completely
closed—is hazardous without the added bonus of blurred vision. At least I
didn’t bump into anything, and even as I blundered in the same general
direction as the traffic, I was clinically amazed at how white the world
appeared. The only colours in evidence were the rainbow rim of every globular
shape in my path. Honestly, it was like a grand mal Horner’s episode! (Ru
note: when the syndrome kicks in, my vision goes a little warped and blurry.
It’s like looking at light through a prism. It doesn’t last long and, more
importantly, it’s not painful.)
Back in the sanctuary of my shadowed office, computer work was out of
the question. This did not stop me from coaching our office manager through how
to upload documents to a Sharepoint site or IMing Ter to let her know how I was
doing. I finally squinted through running a database report to give me a
paperwork project for the afternoon. With the aid of one desk lamp, I managed
to get some of it done before Coffee on the Wall.
My eyes felt little better and the pupils were still huge at 1:30. We
found a shady spot in the library courtyard, partly for my eyes, but mostly
because my wee sister is on medication that will make her burst into flame if
she gets too much sun.
Geez, I wondered aloud, how long before my eyes get back to normal?
“It takes a while,” Boy Sister said, sympathetically, “but when it
starts, it doesn’t take long.”
A half-hour later, I widened my eyes at wee sister. “Are they any
smaller?”
She made a scrunchy face. “Not much.”
And I’d hoped they were shrinking because the tears had stopped.
One more hike back to the office before quitting time. I was dousing the
orbs hourly with the drops I’d got from the doctor; they were burning and
scratchy and blurry and by the end of the workday, I wanted to cry except my
tear glands had packed up and left town. I took a final look in the mirror
before I left work, half-fearing I’d get on the wrong bus and wind up at UVic
instead of home, and did my eyes deceive me? Probably, since it looked as if
the left pupil was almost back to normal while my right was stuck at full
throttle. I looked like David Bowie. How the heck had he managed with one pupil
fixed and dilated for most of his life? (I read somewhere that it was the
result of a blow to his eye when he was a young ’un.)
As luck had it, I ran (figuratively) into a neighbour at the limo stop,
so she got me onto the right bus without a clue that I was guessing at pretty
much everything; how I picked her from the crowd would have been a miracle
except that she saw me while I was still trying to figure out if I was seeing
her. I was safe in my comfy chair with a cup of tea and a cookie when Ter came
home, and by then, all that remained of my Big Eye Stuffie impression was the
dry scratchies when I blinked.
So. What did I learn from this experience?
From now on, I book my annual eye appointment in November.
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