Or, to keep the references to The Simpsons going, “Worst. Vacation. Ever.”
As I start to write this it’s just a bit before 5:30 AM.
I tried going to bed a few hours ago, but, well, here I am writing this.
I normally take a significant amount of time off from work for the holidays. At a minimum, I take off the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, though I usually take Christmas Eve off as well.
This time around I took the full two weeks off.
I didn’t expect that I would do anything fun or exciting, or even anything productive, really (thought I had intended to try to do some work on the whole comic book thing), but I also didn’t expect to spend most of the time being sick. And yet that’s exactly what I did.
I caught a doozy of a cold that at times made it seem as though I would soon become an entirely mucus-based lifeform.
Even after I finally began to recover and return to the state that I bitterly refer to as “normal,” I was still a bit out of it and found myself sleeping away my rapidly-dwindling vacation time.
This completely irregular sleep schedule – as opposed to my normal mostly irregular sleep schedule – has thrown everything completely off-kilter.
Which is part of why I’m up writing this.
In addition to my sleep schedule being wonky, my eyes have been wonkier than usual.
When I first started developing the symptoms of the cold, my Gentle Molding lenses started to bother me. Given that wearing them while sick can lead to bad things happening – namely eye infections – and that I didn’t really have anywhere to go, what with being a leaky, disgusting abomination, I didn’t bother wearing them while I was sick.
This was problematic, as my vision rapidly deteriorates when I don’t wear them. One night without them isn’t a big deal – my typical schedule is to not wear them one night a week – as my eyes hold their shape well enough for me to function normally. After two nights without them, though, functioning becomes a bit more difficult, and after that everything that’s more than five feet in front of me becomes an indistinct blur.
So that means that I have to resort to wearing my glasses.
However, there’s a problem with that.
I can’t actually wear them and get any benefit from doing so until after about three days of not wearing my lenses, but even so, no matter how long I go without wearing my lenses, my vision never reverts back to being as bad as it was when I regularly wore my glasses.
So wearing them leads to headaches and nausea. And even if it weren’t for that, I couldn’t just wear them all the time like I used to, because back when I wore them regularly that whole “five feet in front of me” thing was too far to see without them.
So if I want to be able to see something that’s not five feet and one inch away from me and have it not be a blur when I’m in that state, I have to take them off.
That gets old real quick.
After finally recovering enough from the cold I thought it was safe to wear my lenses again.
That worked about as well as pouring sulphuric acid directly into my eyes.
So, okay, I wasn’t sufficiently recovered.
I gave it a couple more days. Same thing.
Then I thought, “Hmm, sometimes this happens when I get the lenses mixed up and wear the right lens in my left eye and vice versa,” so, because I can never remember which is which (the lenses are only distinguishable from each other by the size of the dots on them), I decided to try swapping them.
It had been my right eye that was bothering me primarily when I wore the lenses. What I found upon switching them was that my left eye started bothering me, while my right eye was mostly okay.
(Based on how my vision turned out, though, it was clear that I had been correctly matching the lenses with their corresponding eyes before doing the swap.)
So I thought that maybe there was just something wrong with that lens. Maybe it somehow got warped or something.
I still have my old pair of lenses, so I cleaned the right one, put it in, and success! My right eye wasn’t bothering me at all. But then my left eye – which had the newer lens in – started to really bother me. Okay, so both lenses are jacked up somehow.
At that point, it was 4 AM and I didn’t feel like bothering with cleaning the old left lens, so I just took the left one out and slept with the old right lens in.
So when I got up yesterday, I could see again (even though my vision was corrected in only one eye…that’s kind of how my eyes work, or don’t work, I guess. I don’t know.).
I didn’t feel like bothering with going to the eye doctor to find out what was up with my lenses, figuring I could deal with that some other day and just wear my old lenses for the time being.
So, before going to bed a few hours ago, I cleaned both lenses, popped them in and found that my fucking right eye was killing me again.
Not as bad as with the new lens, but even so.
It doesn’t seem to be an infection, as my eyes feel fine when I don’t have the lenses in (though they remain irritated for a while after I take them out), and I don’t have the problems I had in the past when my eyes were infected, so I don’t know what’s up with that..
What I do know is that the lingering irritation even after I took it out contributed to keeping me awake and finally forcing me to admit defeat and get out of bed.
The other thing I know is that these past two weeks have sucked ass.
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