Things about eyes
As you may or may not know by now, I am diabetic. I can’t quite be bothered to go into an explanation of what diabetes actually is vs what everybody thinks it is, but I will tell you that we need to have our eyeballs screened about once a year to make sure you aren’t going blind for diabetic reasons. Yes, I already see an optician as I am already a bit along the blind spectrum as someone with a +8.00 prescription, but eye screenings focus on parts of the eye that normal opticians tend not to.
I didn’t have a screening last year because I was caught up in moving house in Soton. But when we moved again for Will’s work I had to get onto the new local system.
They always advise you to bring someone with you (and definitely not to drive), because afterwards you will be blind for a while. There are two reasons this happens.
Firstly, you go into the room, and they give you some eye drops. These particular eye drops sting like a motherfucker. I am used to being a lens wearer but those drops are something I would not adapt to having in my eyes. Ouch.
The drops widen your pupils and make them stay like that. It takes about 15 minutes. You go back into the waiting room and wait for it to take effect. You start to notice it because, even with your glasses on, you stop being able to read the posters on the wall. Words are nonsense and everything blurs. For me, everything also goes a slightly brown shade.
This is something that sometimes happens to me on a milder scale because I have Dysautonomia, sometimes my pupils just don’t want to be the right size for the light level.
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| WIDE ? |
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| Benefit of living in the middle of nowhere is that you pass cows on the way to places. |
So, you go back into the room, sit in front of the machine, put your chin on the chin rest and so forth. The machine can now take photos of way at the back of your eye. The problem is that it does this with a series of bright flashes that are physically painful. The images taken of your eyes are then sent off to someone else for analysis.
Getting home was agony because my pupils were still stuck being super wide for a while. It was a hot and bright day and, even under my sunhat, it hurt a lot. I had to stop periodically, when there was a long straight path I also tried driving my chair along with my eyes closed for a while. I couldn’t see the fine details of things like kerbs and got myself a bit stuck on a bit that I wasn’t supposed to go up.
Eventually I got home into nice darkness, could magnify my laptop screen for a while, and wait for the eye drops to wear off.
To be honest, I have no idea if my eyes have deteriorated, I have so many visual disturbances at the moment due to the almost constant migraines. On that note, my scan to make sure it’s not a tumour, has been pushed back because my neurologist decided to up and go on holiday. So Will rang them up and pointed out that I might be dead by then if it is a brain tumour. So the department said that if somebody else cancels, they’ll give me that appointment if it’s closer. I understand that doctors need holidays like everybody else, but you think they’d block out a section of time that they didn’t make appointments in to begin with, rather than make the appointments, then shunt them all back, especially when the people waiting to see you are waiting to find out if they have a brain tumour. ?
On another note entirely, I did a thing with regard to my house plan. As I’ve almost definitely said before, Floorplanner doesn’t let you see all the floors on top of each other, which is a bit of a bummer (and trying to make it in Sketchup yourself is a NIGHTMARE do not do it).
Then yesterday it occurred to me out of the blue. DUH, I have Photoshop Elements on my computer! I’m not normally any good with that sort of thing but I realised I could put one floor image on top of the other and make one of them a bit transparent. D’oooooooooooh Letti.
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| Ta dah! I even managed to cut out the galleried landing. C’est amusant! |
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| This angle was trickier but I still sort-of did it. |
See this post for more house plans detail.
When we eventually got to the point of building a house I would probably ask builders to make all the windows look better/ more aligned together, I don’t want to end up on McMansion Hell (which is a really good site and you should honestly read it).
P.S. It’s Nunavut day! I love Nunavut.
P.P.S.
I was part of an interesting discussion on Twitter the other day. I’ve said before that if I could chose a superpower, it would be to speak and understand every human language.
Someone asked which languages you would download into your brain if you could. It would be amazing if we could do that one day. I hope science invents a sort of chip or something we can have inserted. I bet it would be expensive at first though ?
But yes, the languages I would choose to download into my brain so that I could speak, understand when spoken, read, and write them, are (even though I should already know some of these):
- Brezhoneg (Breton)
- Russian
- Hebrew
- Udmurt
- Oirat
- Inuktitut
- Japanese
- Swedish
- BSL
- Probably French for good measure?