My Bad Eyes

I have bad eyes. I blame both my mom and my dad, I think they contributed equally. Sometime in college, my eye doctor figured out that I was getting headaches because my eyes prefer to focus in front of whatever I'm looking at instead of on it (this is a neurological problem that is actually quite common but you only notice it if you read a lot like when you're a strapping young college student). This would explain why as a kid I always preferred to read in the dark (relaxes my eyes) and I would always hold the book an inch away from my face (you bring things closer to you to compensate without noticing).

As a result, I wear bifocals. This helps a great deal. Once I started wearing the bifocals, my eyes got worse because I wasn't fighting the problem any more. So now, without my bifocals, I can barely read a menu without getting a headache. Most of the time, the bifocals do the trick. Sometimes, it's not enough. If I have to do a lot of heavy reading, I will eventually get a headache even with the bifocals.

I have a few other problems too. It's weird, but I get motion sick when I'm counting colonies (bacterial colonies on plates). When I was in grad school and had to count a lot of colonies, I theorized that the problem was caused by a problem looking through the right part of my glasses (you are limited in mobility when doing this sort of thing). I tried all sorts of weird setups so that I would look through the right part of my glasses and never found anything that worked all that great, plus I think I was ratching myself up the nerd-scale at work. So I just settled for taking a nice five minute break every half hour or so to walk around and get my motion sensors back under control.

Also, some of you with bifocals may have noticed this problem: going up and down stairs can really get you screwed up if you're not used to wearing the bifocals. Sometimes when I know I won't have to be doing any reading, I switch over to contacts, and when I switch back to my bifocals I have to be careful not to fall down any stairs.

So that is a little piece of my life.

Tomorrow is Friday!!