Goat Notes

Follow-up eye examination yesterday, to January's laser surgery for an incipient retinal tear.  Discharged with verdict of complete success, and the strong hint that next time anything suspicious occurs with my eyes, I report straight to the Eye Hospital's casualty unit instead of futzing about through my GP.  Which is certainly not the sort of song UK health managers and their bosses are trying to put on for mood music!

There was a trainee opthalmologist sitting in on the session, and for whom I performed some minor guinea-piggery afterwards.  She was both polite and an obviously enthusiastic learner, so the experience was pleasant in particular, as well as being a very light price for getting ocular medicine immediately and in the next generation.  There was one thing she did not seem to have learned yet, and which I'd never even considered, until then given occasion to think it out on the way home...

Opthalmologists at work should probably array themselves blandly.  All the others I've met, have done so.  Being a negative, this is not something which I found especially remarkable at the time.  But when you're depending on your patient's ability to hold steady focus in arbitrary and often unnatural directions, swirls of colour and glints of silver and cleverly styled cascades of shining and shifting curls are not unmitigated assets.  This is actually worse as an attendant than as a principal actor: I think this is because Butterfly Person is then more often in peripheral vision, where reactions to movement and shiny are less likely to pass through consciousness first.

What I have seen eye doctors use to effect is a stud ear-ring as one convenient point of patient focus - "Look at my ear!" being almost a watchword with these folks under many circumstances.

So I learned a little bit yesterday, too.  And was a very great deal relieved, at the continuing lights of my world.

Writing?  Naw.