Wait 'til you see the PINKS of their eyes!
My body is weird.
Have I ever mentioned that?
Anyway, the latest weirdness is a recurring Conjunctivitis of Unknown Origin (i.e., my left eye keeps getting all red for no apparent reason). It's been happening on and off for an entire month now!
Around January 24 or 25, I noticed that the white (conjunctiva) of my left eye was looking a little non-uniformly pink. I had a mild but persistent cough at the time & thought it might be allergies, so I ignored it. I wasn't having any pain or itching or discharge or ... well, pretty much anything but pink.
Just in case it was "pinkeye" (the extremely communicable viral infection most people think of when you say "conjunctivitis"), I worked hard at washing my hands all the time, not touching my eyes, etc.
I started taking Claritin: the coughing went away, but the pink eye only got pinker. "Pinkeye" seemed unlikely (due to how long the pinkness had been happening), so I made a doctor appointment (at the insistent urging of my health insurance advice nurse on the phone). The morning of the doctor appointment (Jan. 30th), my eye looked almost entirely better! Magic! So I canceled the appointment and went on my merry way.
In the days that followed, my eye looked a tiny bit pink here and there, but I didn't worry much. Seasonal allergies, I figured. My eye often looked mostly fine for days at a time.
Then significant redness popped up again while we were in Hawaii. WTF? Seasonal allergies seemed less likely at that point, since we were in a completely different environment with completely different allergens! But then the pinkness seemed to subside again.
Yesterday morning, Shannon mentioned that my eye looked really red, but I just waved it off, because I hadn't noticed it while getting ready (brushing my teeth and such in front of the mirror) & so figured it couldn't be too bad. Later, when I saw it in good lighting mid-afternoon, I decided to come home from CWC and call the doctor again. It was really really red.
So I saw the GP today & he asked all kinds of questions, peered into my eye through a magnifying glass, applied dyes, shone a black light at me, made me look in all kinds of various directions ... and in the end did what most doctors do when they see me: he shrugged his shoulders and said, "Something definitely isn't right, but I have no answer for you."
His working theory is that it's viral conjunctivitis, and that it went away & I just somehow managed to reinfect myself immediately afterward. Repeatedly. Always in the same eye. Without ever apparently infecting the other eye or anyone else around me. This theory seems a little weak, even to him, so he said that I should go to an ophthalmologist if the problem hasn't gone away within a week. This outcome seems quite likely.
On the plus side, he says that the fact that I had the cataract surgery so recently (9 months ago) makes many conditions less likely, because the docs were examining my eye so closely before and after the surgery that they would certainly have noticed anything serious (like glaucoma). A few different times he backtracked to say that glaucoma is still a possibility, but then always reiterated immediately that it doesn't seem likely because of all the tests done around the time of the surgery.
So I'm probably not going blind. That's a plus.
On the other hand, in the past month or so I've also been having some mysterious vision problems, such as having trouble reading road signs in the distance, and my left eye-the pink one-is the one set for distance vision. I hadn't made that connection until just now.
But I'm assuming that this is going to turn out to just be one of my body's little weirdnesses ... of which there are so many. It'll probably mysteriously go away after a dozen fruitless doctor appointments, or it will continue on indefinitely and no one will ever figure out why. 'Cause that's just the way my body rolls.
Have I ever mentioned that?
Anyway, the latest weirdness is a recurring Conjunctivitis of Unknown Origin (i.e., my left eye keeps getting all red for no apparent reason). It's been happening on and off for an entire month now!
Around January 24 or 25, I noticed that the white (conjunctiva) of my left eye was looking a little non-uniformly pink. I had a mild but persistent cough at the time & thought it might be allergies, so I ignored it. I wasn't having any pain or itching or discharge or ... well, pretty much anything but pink.
Just in case it was "pinkeye" (the extremely communicable viral infection most people think of when you say "conjunctivitis"), I worked hard at washing my hands all the time, not touching my eyes, etc.
I started taking Claritin: the coughing went away, but the pink eye only got pinker. "Pinkeye" seemed unlikely (due to how long the pinkness had been happening), so I made a doctor appointment (at the insistent urging of my health insurance advice nurse on the phone). The morning of the doctor appointment (Jan. 30th), my eye looked almost entirely better! Magic! So I canceled the appointment and went on my merry way.
In the days that followed, my eye looked a tiny bit pink here and there, but I didn't worry much. Seasonal allergies, I figured. My eye often looked mostly fine for days at a time.
Then significant redness popped up again while we were in Hawaii. WTF? Seasonal allergies seemed less likely at that point, since we were in a completely different environment with completely different allergens! But then the pinkness seemed to subside again.
Yesterday morning, Shannon mentioned that my eye looked really red, but I just waved it off, because I hadn't noticed it while getting ready (brushing my teeth and such in front of the mirror) & so figured it couldn't be too bad. Later, when I saw it in good lighting mid-afternoon, I decided to come home from CWC and call the doctor again. It was really really red.
So I saw the GP today & he asked all kinds of questions, peered into my eye through a magnifying glass, applied dyes, shone a black light at me, made me look in all kinds of various directions ... and in the end did what most doctors do when they see me: he shrugged his shoulders and said, "Something definitely isn't right, but I have no answer for you."
His working theory is that it's viral conjunctivitis, and that it went away & I just somehow managed to reinfect myself immediately afterward. Repeatedly. Always in the same eye. Without ever apparently infecting the other eye or anyone else around me. This theory seems a little weak, even to him, so he said that I should go to an ophthalmologist if the problem hasn't gone away within a week. This outcome seems quite likely.
On the plus side, he says that the fact that I had the cataract surgery so recently (9 months ago) makes many conditions less likely, because the docs were examining my eye so closely before and after the surgery that they would certainly have noticed anything serious (like glaucoma). A few different times he backtracked to say that glaucoma is still a possibility, but then always reiterated immediately that it doesn't seem likely because of all the tests done around the time of the surgery.
So I'm probably not going blind. That's a plus.
On the other hand, in the past month or so I've also been having some mysterious vision problems, such as having trouble reading road signs in the distance, and my left eye-the pink one-is the one set for distance vision. I hadn't made that connection until just now.
But I'm assuming that this is going to turn out to just be one of my body's little weirdnesses ... of which there are so many. It'll probably mysteriously go away after a dozen fruitless doctor appointments, or it will continue on indefinitely and no one will ever figure out why. 'Cause that's just the way my body rolls.