20160305.0858

My eye continues to be an issue. There was some difficulty with the optometrist's appointment I had; my eye doctor had had a death in the family, so my regular eye exam is being rescheduled, but I was able to get in with another. He told me that it looks as if one or more of the glands that secrete lubricating fluid on the inner eyelid are plugged. Warm compresses are the prescribed treatment, as well as a course of antibiotics meant to ensure that the incipient infection he noticed does not spread. The compresses have already helped; what the antibiotics will do is not yet clear to me, but I will take the prescribed and paid-for medication as directed. Perhaps it marks me as overly credulous that I would do so, but I do not think suffering an eye infection is a good idea.

That my eye is undergoing repairs is an inconvenience, of course, since work continues. I need to clear out a few more stacks of grading, which is something that requires the use of my eyes and hands; I cannot spend all my time on pressing a compress to one side of my face and still get done what needs doing in that regard. Too, the reading I need to do for my freelance work demands that I have my glasses on--I do not wear them for show, but because I cannot see without them. The compress and the glasses do not work well together at all. And I likely ought to be doing something or other towards finding permanent work, as well as on the many other projects that present themselves to me as needing attention. None of this works well with me tending to my eye, but all of it relies on my eye working as it ought to do, and that is simply not the case right now.

What will probably happen is that I will work more slowly than I would like to do, pushing through for a while and then breaking to take care of the eye for a while. It is something I have done any number of times with other concerns, attending to one task and then breaking to attend to another before breaking again to attend to the first, and on in a cycle. I do not necessarily like to work so slowly as stopping to compress my eye will demand, but I am aware that failing to do so will have deleterious consequences later, and I can afford them even less than I can afford the work slowdown. It is an issue of how badly and in what way I will screw myself, which is not the kind of situation I appreciate having even if it is one that seems endemic; I have noted before the need to get through the short term to even consider the long term, and that need is of much the same type in that it piles up negative future consequences in the hopes of having a future in which to deal with them. It is the way things are, and not only for me; I know many in such a situation, and I imagine that there are many more whom I do not know. But I will only be able to imagine them if I cannot see, so I need to attend to my eye as I attend as well to the work there is for me to do.