forgot to mention

I forgot to mention that the current evening trip to the new campus is pretty valiant on my part… I was in bed much of the day with this accursed London throat germ– which is now proven to be a Cairo throat germ that takes advantage of colder London temperatures to assault me.

As I’ve mentioned before, the 2007 Speculative Realism workshop at Goldsmiths was the greatest physical agony of my life aside from a very bad case of chicken pox at age 11 (well, I also had one childhood fever that was pretty brutal, especially when I was forced to take an ice water bath to fight the fever; and the wisdom teeth removal was no cakewalk either, at least not after that angelic valium wore off; though drugs are of no interest to me personally –my mind is weird enough in its natural state– that one experience with the valium i.v. for wisdom teeth made it clear to me why many people do become drug addicts; I could hear them pull out the teeth, and even feel the pain of the teeth coming out, but I just didn’t care; I felt like laughing– no wonder people become drug addicts).

I was only in the hospital once… a few days before turning 16, playing soccer (that’s “football” to most of you), I and a defender were running head on for the same ball. He got there first, and kicked it straight up into my face. Yes, a soccer ball can hit your eye if it’s placed just right. It hit mine.

From my right eye I saw nothing but blackness. There I was at 15, sitting on the sideline, pretty convinced that I was facing the rest of my life with sight in only one eye. It’s the only time I can recall being placed in such a grimly stoical situation. I remember feeling gloomy but calm, and ready to face the worst.

Within a half hour the vision in my right eye was sort of milky. I went to the hospital emergency room, and feeling much better about my chances by the time I got there. But the doctor on duty took a look and coldly told me that there had been “serious damage”. So I was assuming the worst again.

It was a hematoma, or cut retina, the eyeball had been filled with blood, and that’s why I had no vision in my right eye for awhile. Essentially I was required to stay immobilized for three days in bed (much harder than it sounds). Then I was released from the hospital, either on my 16th birthday or one day after.

My right eye is still worse than my left eye, though a series of doctors have insisted this could be just coincidence. I do still have a slight tendency to squint in the right eye when outdoors in sunlight.

But it could have been so much worse… On a follow-up visit to the eye doctor’s office, ahead of me was a farmer who had had powerful fertilizer sprayed in his eye. I think his prognosis was infinitely worse than mine.

The eye doctor was one of the all-time jerks I have ever met in the medical profession, cocky and belittling. I hated his guts at age 15, and still hate his guts in memory now. But he was obviously pretty skilled.