my day at the doctor, in painstaking detail:
yesterday i went to the eye doctor with my host mom. she somehow managed to talk them into seeing me right then and there, even though you usually have to make an appointment. we went in this sterile little office with a desk and a few chairs and i attempted for several minutes to explain (in spanish) that I have this spot in my left eye vision that is a little round white flashing thing that is often accompanied by a dull headache. i also tried to explain that it's been going on for five days and it is worrisome. The doctor nodded his head in an alarmingly not-worried way and attached me to that chin/eye/looking machine and stared at my eyes for a little and then told us to follow him into a different room. so we go to this other room and there's a little bed thing covered in someone else's hair and dark yellow stains. he tells me to lie down on it. then without explaining what he's doing he puts some drops in my eyes and told me to go sit in the waiting room. so host mom and i sit in the waiting room for a good half hour and discuss why my host brother is so moody for a little bit until i realize that my eyes are dialating. i ask my host mom if my eyes are dialated (actually, i didn't know how to say that in spanish, so i asked if the black part was big) and she goes, "AY, ESTÁN ENORMES! NO ME MIRES ASÍ!" and then we continue talking, and i feel really akward because she doesn't want to look at my eyes but she wants me to talk to her. so i show her the sweater i compulsively bought on my way to meet her to go to the eye doctor, and she got really excited because all winter clothes are on sale now since it's getting really hot out. we decided that after this we would go together back to this store so she could also buy a winter sweater on sale. (meanwhile i'm wondering how i'm going to navigate that with dialated eyes, but figure i'll deal with that when the time comes) then the eye doctor comes out into the waiting room with a bottle of mystery liquid and grabs my face and starts to drop something in my eyes, but then makes a confused face and decides not to and walks away without saying anything. 10 minutes later he comes out and says we should go back in the scary room with the dirty bed. so i go in there and lie down on the dirty bed and he shines lights in my eyes and tells me to look arriba, bajo, to the side, at my foot, at him, atras, etc, the whole time he's holding my eyelids open with his fingers at a very painful angle. then he tells me to sit up and he walks out of the room. then a different doctor comes in with the other doctor, and they tell me to lie down again and they do the whole thing over again, both of them hovering over my eyes. Then the second doctor announces that there's nothing wrong with me and walks out. the first doctor tells me to sit up and repeats that nothing is wrong with me. But then I point out that I still have a white flashing spot in my vision accompanied with pain, and that to me would indicate that something's wrong. "Ah, tenés razón," he says. (you can only understand how funny that is if you've lived in Argentina) So then we all truck back over to his office and we sit there, him on one side of the desk and me and host mom on the other, and he says that nothing's wrong with my eyes but that my left eye is inflamed. i interject and point out that an inflamation means something's wrong with it, and my host mom and the doctor just laugh while i sit there and be really confused. the doctor says he thinks something probably hit my eye and made it react this way. He wrote me a prescription for some mystery liquid eye drops and told me to use them in my left eye every four hours for four days, and said to come back if it didn't get better. so host mom and i get in a cab, and she says since i'm a ciega and have ojos enormes she would go sweater shopping by herself after the cab drops me off at home. on the way home she also tells me all about how my host brother had to have eye surgery when he was two. so i get home and try to take a nap because i can't read/computer/work/see due to my ojos enormes. but that lasts for about three minutes because the other american came home and proceeded to have a loud conversation with her boyfriend on the phone. so i got up and walked to the farmacia to try to fill my prescription for myster eye drops. i go there, and the pharmacist looks at the prescription, makes a face, looks it up on the dinasaur computer and then reaches under the counter and gives me a box and says "creo que es esto". ummm... right. so i pay 54 pesos for this bottle of liquid that the pharmacist THINKS is what the doctor prescribed and go home, praying that when i put it in my eye my head won't fall off. i've been using the drops, and as far as i can tell, it's just a bottle of water. but we'll see what happens.