Keriosity

Some of you may be wondering why there were no blogs written last week. That’s because I was very sick. Emil and I were both very sick. Since we don’t have a new doctor yet, we had to go to the Urgent Care Center, where I didn’t really see a lot of “urgency” going on. Emil went on Tuesday and I went on Wednesday. The doctors diagnosed us as having sinus infections but I think my diagnosis was based more on Emil having one than on me having one because I wasn’t even congested. I just had a raging fever that wouldn’t quit, so I’m pretty sure I had the flu. We spent the entire week and weekend on the sofa watching TV and drinking gatorade, waiting for our mega antibiotics to get to work. Having a fever for 5 days straight is to be in complete misery. It hurt to move my eyeballs. The air hurt my skin.

I have often said that being sick is very lonely. There you are, alone in your suffering, laying on the sofa, unable to make others fully appreciate how awful you feel, and there’s nothing to watch on TV. Being sick WITH someone, on the same sofa, now that was interesting. I don’t think that’s happened to me since grade school. But this time food and juice didn’t magically appear. One of us had to go to the store and get it. And one of us had to walk the dog every few hours. Normally this sort of thing would be decided by a rock-paper-scissor competition (best 2 out of 3), but we were even too sick for that. We decided the fair thing would be that whoever had the lowest fever at that moment would go. This usually worked out in my favor, so I liked this system. As it happens, last week was also the beginning of spring-like weather here - which means it was sunny and in the 70’s-80’s every day. We felt like kids with broken legs in summertime. We couldn’t go outside. We couldn’t go to the pool (but we could hear other kids in the pool from our apartment.) Torture!

It’s a really bad thing for your psyche to be so sick on the same week that Terri Shiavo and the Pope die in what turns out to be, as horrible as this sounds, a long, drawn-out media death-watch. This does not make you want to rally and set your mind-over-matter to overcome your diseased body. It just throws your into a depressed state of waiting for the inevitable. In my fevered delirium, I connected with these two comrades a little more so than 98.6 degreed people I think. I found myself sending telepathic messages to the pope “Go towards the light, John Paul. Do you see the light? What’s it like in heaven? Can you move your eyeballs? Oh that must be so nice.” At one point, after watching all the protesters and the pilgrims and the speculation and waiting to see if lights went out in the vatican windows, and the endless videotape of hospital rooms and sickbeds and 5-year-olds getting arrested - I almost called Larry King to say “Please, can’t the media just leave us alone to be in peace?! We’re human beings, not circus freak-shows!” And I was grateful to have updated my completely non-legally binding handmade living-will just the week before, although I never really specified what to do with me in the event of a high fever that leaves me irrational and begging for mercy. I’m not sure “put me down old-yeller style” is a medically accepted procedure anyhow.

I don’t recommend getting this flu. It’s not your usual flu where you may stay home for 2 days but you’ll return to work still feeling sick because you can manage. You won’t manage with this flu unless your job doesn’t require you to think, move, or look to the side.

So I’ve had these bad headaches almost daily for months now and after blood tests, an MRI, a visit to a neurologist, tons of different headache medications, and a visit to the opthomologist - the latest theory of the cause of these headaches is: I have a weakness in the muscles of my eyes, so even though my vision is just fine - I have a hard time converging objects that are within reading distance of my eyes. Eyes really gross me out, so this hasn’t been a fun process. The details are boring and I won’t belabor you with them - but here are some interesting items on this subject…

- My problem was probably caused by the jarring of my eye muscles whenever I get clocked in the head by a big dog at work. This happens about once every two or three months. Most people with this convergence problem have eyes that are slightly misaligned with each other. Mine are the very rare “perfectly aligned” eyes (yes I’m bragging. I have perfect eyes.) so an injury probably caused it. In this case - dogs beating me up. Hey, I wonder if I could get workers’ comp?

- To fix this problem, I have to undergo eyeball physical therapy. Well that’s not the official name, but that’s what I’ve been calling it. I saw an “Orthoptist” yesterday - she specializes in treating disorders of the eye muscles. She gave me exercises to do. Eyeball exercises. I have to do eyeball exercises as many times a day as I can for 4 weeks. Then she will give me different eyeball exercises. Now I know you are imagining “Ok, look left, left, left, left and right, right, right, right,” because that’s what I envisioned but actually it’s just a piece of paper with a line down the middle and a red dot on the line. I have to hold the paper so that it’s perpendicular to my face and touching the bridge of my nose. Most people will see one dot and two lines, but I see two of each and so I have to practice focusing them into one dot and two lines and holding it for 10 seconds at a time. Anyway, the point is - it looks ridiculous with me holding a paper to my nose and then staring at it cross-eyed, but I have to do it many times a day.

- This exercise reminds me of an interesting fact. You know how bird eyes are on the sides of their faces so they have great peripheral vision? Well one of the ways you can subdue a chicken is to draw vertical line in the sand in front of them. Since they, (like me), have convergence problems due to such crazily aligned eyes (not like me, remember - mine are perfect), they can’t tell if it’s one line or two lines and they stare at it trying to figure it out. While they are distracted by the line, you can pick them up and restrain them. We learned this in veterinary technician school. And it works. This makes me not want to do my exercises in public (as if looking silly wasn’t a good enough reason) because while I am trying to turn two dots into one dot - I could get mugged or something.

So long story short - dogs beat me up which made me have the eyesight of a chicken, so now I need eyeball physical therapy.

I was dying to do this practical joke. A few weeks ago, we removed an eye from a dog (ew, I know) and my boss keeps it in a jar and named it Irene. I thought it would be fun to show up to the eye therapist with a patch over one eye, hand her the jar and say “can you fix this?” Or, I could start doing the eye exercises and when she’s not watching, throw Irene on the floor, squint my eye and exclaim “OOOOW! I think I did that one wrong.” That would be fun. Ew but Irene is so gross, I couldn’t do those jokes.