Remember that time it took me months to recover from my retinal detachment and my eye became red and itchy and painful because I had a corneal defect that would heal up during the night and then rip right off when I opened my lids in the morning? It turns out that this is "dry eye." It's what happens when the body stops producing the oily element ( Read more... )

Remember that time that my eye exploded? I had to fly home from Toronto and have surgery and I spent a week lying on my stomach, unable to move my head. I couldn't fly for three months, which was exceptionally inconvenient because I travel internationally for a living. My pupil wouldn't close for six months. My eye was red and gross and I developed ( Read more... )

My cornea has a defect ( Read more... )

It is Sunday and I am not in Tunis. I canceled my ticket at the last minute and wrote lengthy apologies to my colleagues. I will spend much of the week Skyping with Syrian activists in Tunis while being filmed by documentary filmmakers, but I will not be there myself ( Read more... )

The Hubba Hubba Revue had its first night in its new space at Inner Mission, which proved to be a smashing success. After a year of anemic Thursdays at the DNA Lounge, it was nice to see a full house. Inner Mission is the old Cell Space tarted up with curtains from the Warfield (I think it was the Warfield) and somebody's Burning Man bar. It's got ( Read more... )

Traditionally, I refer to Halloween as amateur night. Oh, you like dressing up? You think it's fun to wear costumes? Here is my zombie costume and my Edwardian bathing costume and every go-go outfit I have ever worn for the Hubba Hubba Revue and my ball gown and my baroque Spanish gown from the San Francisco Opera and endless corsets and wigs and ( Read more... )

For a full five minutes on my way to the DNA Lounge for the Hubba Hubba Revue's last show in that venue, I actually worried that my blown-out post-surgical eye might make my creepy insane asylum nurse costume look bad. Those are five minutes of my life that I will never get back, Concerned Reader. And that's what it's like to be inside of my head ( Read more... )

It turns out that I am an optimist after all. I see my eyeball as half full. It is still not possible to see out of my left eye, especially since the meniscus wobbles straight through the middle of my line of vision. If I tilt my head down, I can look through the liquid and the world becomes a fish bowl. I can reasonably expect the gas bubble to ( Read more... )

By the time I managed to see a doctor in ess eff, my vision was noticeably worse. The dark spot was blotting out about 30% of my vision and the remainder of my visual field was beginning to warp and blur, which is a sign that the detachment had started to reach my macula, the central part of the retina which is responsible for visual acuity. A ( Read more... )

If anyone had thought to ask me two weeks ago, I would have told them that the saddest words in the English language are "empty hotel room." I enjoy being Carmen San Diego--the corporate overlords who sent me out to Washington DC to give a talk at a think tank were pleased enough that they would like me to put on a repeat performance in January-- ( Read more... )