Day four: without thinking about it, I had both eyes open while knitting, whereas yesterday I kept the one closed without even thinking about it.

It made me think about it: I suddenly realized what was bugging me so much. The visual image at center, such as it was on the right, didn’t quite entirely come together properly with the left. Like one hand was off by an inch or so towards and away from me from each other, like trying to put a torn page back in the book and getting it wrong. It was so strange. I had to force myself to keep going. But Aftober, the annual finish your UFO by the end of the month race, is on and I want this afghan finally done. By the third long row I let go and just went with it and let it amuse me.

One more week till I can wash my hair. That eye cannot get wet.

One more week till I can take the hospital warning bracelet off announcing I have a gas bubble in my eye.

I was told I could not go above 1000′ elevation. If I wanted to go to Santa Cruz, I absolutely was to take the long way around across the valley and not over the mountains, and the doctor said with more emotion than he probably intended, Don’t! Go! to Tahoe!!

I wondered which one of his patients had decided to use his medical time off to go skiing with an eye mask on and what had possessed him, but apparently someone did and it was a notable enough case that all such patients at that clinic are now specifically forbidden Tahoe. High elevation changes the gas. You do not want to mess with what that gas bubble was put there to do.

I wondered what on earth people who live in Denver do.

Poking around, I found a story of an elderly woman who’d come to NIH because she’d had retina surgery and then a cardiac event. The ER saved her life but didn’t know about her surgery and so didn’t contact the surgeon, and the treatment they used forced her gas bubble into her brain. It recovered. But her eye was blinded.

The bracelet says, Contact opthalmologist on reverse side before treatment.

I took a peek at the inside edge.

Nobody had filled it out.

I was amused. (The doctor probably wouldn’t be.)