A trip to the eye-doctor Part 1.

We’ll have to go back a week before the trip to the optometrist. I was working on an asset management system for a major Electricity supplier and we were fast approaching the deadline for system implementation. Things were tense as not all the modules had been written and one that I was working on was giving me problems.

The computer I was using suddenly bit the dust and I couldn’t revive it, the problem was not that I had lost my code, everything was saved on a fileserver and backed up, but that I couldn’t continue until I had a working computer and I started to stress out. Then out of nowhere a massive headache began to build.

Now I’d had headaches before (in fact I suffered from chronic headaches for about 15 years) but this was a real ball buster. Feeling really sick, I went to the toilet and threw up for what seemed to be about four days but was probably less. I felt strange so I went to my car, laid the seat back and slept for about an hour. When I went back to work I started throwing up again, there was nothing left to throw up but that didn’t seem to make any difference.

Being unable to stand up without feeling like I would collapse I went back to my car and slept for another hour or so, then decided to go home. The trip should normally take an hour door to door, on this particular day it took me a bit over four hours to get home as I had to stop around 5 or 6 times to either dry heave or sleep.

When I finally got home I was that weak I was barely able to drag myself to bed. Some time later my wife got home and asked me how I was (as I said, I had suffered from headaches for years so this was nothing unusual). I remember saying “My eyeballs hurt” before pulling the covers over my head and going back to sleep.

By the next afternoon I was feeling bit better, although my eyes still seemed to hurt, so I rang work and told them I’d be taking a few days off. I felt awful about it with the deadline and all, but since everyone witnessed my turn the day before, no-one complained.

For the next three days I felt as weak as a kitten, at one point I tried to climb over the fence to help a neighour cut down a tree but couldn’t lift myself off the ground. Since I had some time off, it seemed like now would be a good time to get the prescription for my glasses updated, so I made an appointment.

After the usual ‘read the chart stuff’, she got the funny looking flashlight (we say torch but I can speak American too) and looked into my eyes. It seemed she was looking for a much longer time than normal and finally said that she would need to make a phone call. This turned out to be to an ophthalmologist and she booked me in to see him the next day.

Now is where it starts to get interesting, but due to my aversion to long posts (of which this is already one) I’ll finish the story tomorrow. Any guesses so far?