The injury to the eye motif

Here’s looking at you, Fredric.

The details are a bit icky, but retinal reattachment surgery turns out to be surprisingly un-harrowing, at least in the moment. And the Moorfields experience was pretty much exemplary of the NHS at its best. The recovery process is very tiresome though. I am currently half-blind and will remain so for weeks. Left eye is not entirely sightless, but what it sees is a blurry, wavering, sloshy mess that actively detracts from the vision on the right. And I have to maintain head posture reasonably carefully for awhile, which is especially annoying at night.

Still, it certainly beats the alternative.

Detached

57 the other day. With looming shadows in the periphery.

This morning GP gauged presence in both eyes, suggesting post optic chiasm, neurological. An MRI has been requested.

This afternoon optometrist identified instead a retinal detachment. Now due at Moorfields 8am, with surgery in prospect.

Getting old sucks.

Back in the Saddle

Or at least, the office. Covid itself long gone, though there’s a bit of a residual cough, a bit of fatigue, a bit of general tetchiness. I did eventually get the COMP0160 marking finished, though it was like pulling teeth sometimes. A few students got pretty bad-tempered feedback; next year’s brief is going to be a bit more upfront in stating that vacuous marketing bullshit is not welcome, and neither are appeals to AI magic.

Meanwhile, tomorrow is the COMP0088 exam, which means those students are just getting around to revising and, in consequence, plying me with questions that they really ought to know the answers to by now. On the whole I have managed not to be tetchy with these, by a supreme effort of will. No wonder I am tired.

But anyway. Word association reminds me that I went to Kidd Pivot’s Assembly Hall back before Easter, and it was great. Pite & Young’s dancers are brilliant, so fluid and detailed and precise, and the conceit of dancing to recorded dialogue quickly escapes the initial incongruity to feel natural and illuminating. Their previous show Revisor was the last thing I saw before lockdown in 2020, similarly brilliant and memorable, maybe marginally less fun. It haunted me a little through the long dark months when it seemed there might never be dancing again. I had a relatively good lockdown, all in all, but it still feels like an open wound, raw-edged and tender, a hole in the world. Assembly Hall maybe helped heal just a little of that.

Getting Covid not so much, of course.

Middle Sea

I’d somehow managed to avoid having Covid until last week.

Now on day 12, still testing positive and really very tired of the whole thing. It has not been severe, but it’s exhausting and tedious and generally inconvenient. I have tons of stuff to do, which is getting done very slowly or not at all. Unclear how much of my lack of focus is a direct symptom of the illness and how much is a second order psychological effect of being stuck at home with this fucking virus, but either way it’s bogging me down. Work aside, you’d think this would be an opportunity to catch up on reading and watching, but even frivolous shows feel like too much commitment, too much of an exercise in patience.

I have replayed a decent chunk of Tears of the Kingdom, though.