and things went downhill from there

I had my latest appointment with the eye specialist yesterday, and it went as well as can be expected from these things.


After an earlier treatment, he extended the time between visits to eight weeks, since it's not fun for either of us to get or give a stab in the eye. A few days before my appointment, the vision in that eye began to degrade noticeably - to the point where I'd have called him if I wasn't going to be seeing in him a couple of days anyway. Retinal scans confirmed that the swelling had come back, so he shortened us back to six-weeks between visits. After two of those, he stretched it out to seven weeks for my latest visit. Everything was holding up good, and an eye-test showed me with 20/20 vision with my glasses on¹ so we're pushing the next visit out to eight weeks again with strict instructions to call him immediately if I notice any changes in my sight.


I've never seen the waiting area so empty (there were a couple of people behind me in this shot). Maybe people aren't having eye issues these days in spite of all the smoke.

On another note, we changed our vacation plans this fall. We'd tentatively been hoping to attend one of the conventions that we've been hitting up the past few years, but we've run into the same thing as a lot of other Canadian travellers have been encountering:

"What is required:
An original vaccination card provided by the CDC or a report from a state sponsored organization that will show both doses of a 2-dose vaccine with the second dose being received on or before 08/27/2021 (2 weeks prior) or a 1-dose vaccine being received on or before the same date.

Or

A valid COVID-19 test showing a negative result, the sample for which must have been taken within 72 hours of the convention."

While I applaud them for the measures, there is the issue that since we'd be coming in from another country, we'd have neither a state vaccine card, nor a CDC report. Getting tested in spite of us both being fully vaccinated is a bit insulting, but it also adds a layer of complexity that we ultimately decided wasn't worth dealing with. We'd either have to try and cajole our way into one of the testing sites up here (where they are only taking symptomatic people), or we'd have to drive down early and pay for a test in the US, giving ourselves enough time to get back the negative results.

We also don't know if the border will be open yet. This all added up to us cancelling our vacation plan for another staycation over that weekend.

The other convention we were tentatively looking to attend at the end of the year hasn't announced their COVID plan yet. We'll see if they are limiting it to only US attendees as well.

¹Just to clarify, this is 20/20 vision when it comes to reading. I am very grateful that this eye injury is slightly offset from centre, so it's just outside of the small window in my vision that I use for reading. There is a chance that my vision will never go back to 100%, but as long as they can keep it from getting any worse with these treatments then I'm okay with this.

Another day, another stab in the eye. Nobody warned me that getting older would mean that I'd be getting more and more needles.

I wish there was a way that the present me could go back and warn a much younger me about this. I could have taken up heroin.

You know - to get used to all the needles.

As odd as it sounds, knowing what to expect this time made the shot marginally less awful. From the time they admitted me to the treatment room until the doctor was done with me and leaving again was about 4 minutes. His no-nonsense approach of not dragging things out helped.

Don't get me wrong, getting a needle in the eyeball will never not be a horrible experience, but at least I didn't almost pass out at the end of the procedure this time.

I snapped another picture out the window of the waiting room while I was there. It's a bit more colourful than it was last month. A nice view of the city, IMO.

After coming up clean for years, the hygienist found two cavities on the x-ray during a routine cleaning last week. The dentist came in at the end of the cleaning, double-checked the x-ray and then poked around with a probe and confirmed that I had the beginnings of two small cavities - one on the lower left side, and the other on the upper right - that would need to be addressed. They made a follow-up appointment for today to get them both drilled and filled.

On the one hand, I was glad to be getting them both out of the way at the same time. On the other hand, when you are getting fillings on both sides of your mouth, it makes it hard to pick a side to chew with during the recovery period.

I have bad teeth, which are worse for years of neglect before I got into a good cleaning and brushing cycle again. Having to get two of them extracted turned into a wake-up call for me, and I started taking better care of them again after that. I won't be growing any more teeth as I lose these ones, and I don't want to enter my later years wearing full a full set of dentures like my mother. I inherited my rotten teeth from her side of the family, and I don't want to inherit dentures from her side as well.

I am not a fan of getting dental work done - any dental work, including scaling and cleaning. Fillings and root canals are the worst though. It's not the drilling that bothers me, it's when they inject the Novocaine. I hate getting needles - especially in the mouth. The first couple of times I needed to get injections in the mouth for dental work at my current dentist, I came very close to fainting in the chair. I felt a little silly about it at the times, because my current dentist is actually very skilled; I can barely feel it go in, and there is virtually no soreness when the numbing comes out.

I think I am still traumatized by the dental work I had done on me when I was young. Dad was notorious for sniffing out details. He found a barber who would cut our hair for free, and he took us to him every time he felt we needed a trim. This guy should have been long retired, but he had a dusty old shop set up in the front of an old hotel in Victoria where he would put his blunt razor and old-time hair tonic to good use. Seriously. He hacked off our hair using only a comb and a straight razor, and he had bottles of hair tonic all around his shop.

Anyway, I think he found a deal on a dentist. This guy would do the work for cheap, as long as nobody started asking any awkward questions. The worst thing with him was the needle. My memories are probably clouded by trauma, but I clearly remember it looking like this:


It was huge. You could hear and feel the pop as it pierced the inside of your mouth, and it hurt like heck in spite of the fact that he'd swab on a topical numbing agent first. Almost worse was that he would just blast the Novocaine into you and the yank the needle out again in order to get the process over with as quickly as possible. I remember some of the injections hurting for more than a week after I'd had the fillings done. I also sometimes wonder if he watered down the anaesthetic, because I don't remember having things go as numb as they do when my current dentist performs work.

I am probably being unkind to the man, who probably prided himself in his work, but in my memories of him he was a butcher. One of the teeth I lost in later years was partly due to nerve damage he did with on of his over-aggressive fillings. The bridge that I have there now is part of his legacy. Another part of his legacy was instilling a deep fear of needles into me. It is only in recent years that I can finally get a flu shot without breaking out in a cold sweat and swooning.

One thing I can say with certainty is that if my current dentist had been the one treating me back in my youth, I'd have been more vigilant about keeping up visits as I got older.

I don't know how I should feel about learning that my phone is smarter than I am.

Back in mid October when I learned that we were going to have a flu clinic set up in our office, I put my name on the sign-up sheet and then pulled out my phone and carefully enunciated, "book an appointment for a flu shot on November 30th at 9:45 in the morning."

My phone displayed the details and presented me with a button to confirm the appointment. I wandered back to my desk, and on a whim I checked my desktop calendar. No appointment. It sometimes takes a few minutes for it to sync with my Google calendar, so I worked on something for a few minutes and then checked again. No luck.

I checked my phone's calendar, and the appointment wasn't there either. I sighed, pulled out my phone and booked the appointment again. It confirmed the details and assured me that it was booking the appointment for me. As before, nothing showed up on either of my calendars. I booked it again in slightly more terse tones, and it once again failed to actually populate it anywhere. I finally gave up and entered the appointment manually on my work computer. A few minutes later it showed up on my phone and home computers.

This morning I was looking at my work calendar, and I noticed an appointment on November 30th for a flu shot.

Wait ... what? But I got my shot on October 30th. Why is it on my calendar for November?

Oh.

Right.

Don't you hate it when technology does exactly what you ask it to do?