Juddmansee.com

I woke up this morning with a very swollen left eyelid. It’s not a very pleasant thing to discover after leaping from bed when one’s alarm hasn’t gone off and one is now late to a meeting. Fortunately, it was easy to beg off the early meeting and work from home, so my puffy eye took center stage today.

As I’m sure most of us do these days, I went straight to Web MD. I started ruling out some of the common causes. I also put ice on my eye – time will tell if that helped reduce the swelling or ended up making the area a bit more red than it might have otherwise, thus concerning my doctor. At any rate, I figured some ice and Sudafed wouldn’t hurt, so I tried that and went back to bed for a little while. Called the doctor. Wonder of wonders, they called me back right at 9:05 (the office opened at 9). They were nice. They asked if I wanted to see the doctor today (I said yes). They got me in at 1:45pm. By then, I could easily open my eye and even put in my contacts to drive myself over. It was redder and I felt more pressure behind my eye, but at least the swelling was down substantially.

The doctor asked lots of questions. She tapped on her laptop. She looked and poked. She frowned. She gave me antibiotics, a stern warning to call her and go to the ER if it got worse over the weekend, and sent me to the optometrist. They were also very accommodating and very nice. I saw a new doctor and then she brought in my regular doctor to look too. No weird bumps. No unusual redness. They said it’s better not to wear my contacts, but they didn’t think it was an actual eye problem. They gave me some eye drops to use if my eye felt dry or itchy.

The good news is that I don’t have shingles. Brian and I are convinced, with my history, that it’s sinus infection that decided to settle around my eye. It’s a little weird that 1/4 of my face is red and puffy but the rest is pretty much normal. This is the exact circumstance under which I’d like to have good glasses. [Why don’t I? Wearing gas permeable contacts actually changes the shape of my eye. It takes a few days for it to go back to its natural shape. Having an eye exam when I’ve been wearing my contacts leads to a less accurate prescription for glasses. Since I’ve never been willing to take the eye sight hit for that long, I haven’t gotten a new glasses prescription in >10 years. It’s hard to go from 20/15 vision to 20/100ish for more than a few hours.]

Steve suggested that I should get an eye patch and come to work anyway. He even offered to talk like a pirate in support. Brian found this to be a very funny conversation full of yaarh and ahoy while I was working from home. At any rate, I am planning to be back at work on Monday, and hopefully no black eye patches will be required.