2022 can bite my shiny metal ass

When I list out all the stuff that's happened to me in the last 6 months, it seems slightly unreal.

One of my colleagues called it "the crumblies" - you get to fifty and everything just starts to crumble.

Some of it I've written about previously.

• A stroke in my retina.
• Two eye surgeries.
• Toxoplasmosis.
• A permanent blind spot in one eye.

But I haven't shared this fun news: the day I got out of the second eye surgery, I tested positive for Covid.

So I was struggling with respiratory symptoms while recovering from having my eye deflated.

They also put me on a potent cocktail of drugs, which was enough to make my head literally spin those first couple of nights.

And it doesn't end there! Oh no, my friends, fate had more in store for me.

One night I went to pee and it hurt like crazy. Once the pain settled down, I still felt like I needed to pee very badly. Ended up in Emergency yet again and it turns out I'd passed a kidney stone, which had scratched up my most sensitive tubes on the way out.

If that wasn't enough, I accidentally tipped a few litres of near-boiling water across my wrist, giving me a second degree burn about the size of my hand.

So that meant another night at Emergency and regular check-ups with the Burns Unit, who change your dressings and give you other treatments and exercises as required.

Here's what the burn looked like about two weeks after doing it.

(The pictures from before that are a bit too gruesome to share. I accidentally put one of those on Twitter and traumatised a bunch of people.)

I also had to come down from the drugs they'd given me. After the eye surgery, I was on a lot of steroids to keep the swelling under control. And you have to wean yourselves off them ever so slowly.

The last few steps in that weaning were pretty unpleasant. Each time I tapered down my dose, I'd get withdrawal symptoms - headache, nausea, weakness, head-spins. It has given me new respect for my medications.

But I'm now off all of those medications. The Ophthalmologist says the scans are good. The white area on the left scan is the toxo spreading across my retina. On the right you can see it's shrinking away again.

So I'm on my way out of the diseased doldrums. I started running again!

I take my little poodle to Cornelian Bay, which has a lead-free area, so we can do some laps of the track together. It's glorious!

I also returned to kung fu training and managed to kick my big toe during warm-up. It has gone green.

(Ignore the weird vertical lines on that toenail, that's from a very old injury.)

So I'm crumbling, but I'm not toast quite yet!

I'm working on a new book. I'm doing some great stuff at work - follow my Twitter account to get updates about that. And I'm planning a big lazy Christmas break.

On New Year's Eve, I'll punch 2022 in the kidney as it leaves.

Onward and upward.

JR

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I spy with my crimson eye

You know when people sarcastically say "I'd rather get a needle in my eye"? Well that's how I started my holidays. Now look at me...

Last time I wrote, I was getting hyperbaric treatments after a clot caused a stroke in my retina.

But when I went back to my opthalmologist for a check-up, the blight on my retina was spreading. And there was some cloudiness in my vision too.

That's a clear sign of an infection. So in all likelihood I never had a clot, instead I have some sort of disease in my eye which caused the stroke and is now spreading.

But the specialist has never seen anything like it. There are a few bugs that attack the retina, but they don't present like this. He's sent my scans out to his experts and they all say the same thing: it's a medical mystery.

So they arranged a biopsy. Which means they gave me happy-juice and stuck a needle in my eye, extracting some fluid for testing. A great way to start my time off work!

All the blood around my eye in that picture is just eyeball bruising from a needle poke. It doesn't hurt at all and should fade in the next three weeks.

Earlier this week we were waiting for the lab results to come back, so we could target the infection with the right drugs.

But then my blind spot grew bigger. It's a bit frightening, to be frank. It's not in my central vision yet, but it's getting close.

I told my opthalmologist and we re-did my peripheral vision test, which uses this thing.

You stick your eye on the little circle in the middle. The panel at the back flashes these tiny individual lights and you press a button each time you see one. At the end you get a map of your visual field.

My map is like the start of book two in a fantasy trilogy, where the blackness spreads across the land.

So we can't wait to treat this.

They've put me on the strongest antibiotics they can get, while they try to import the super-strong stuff into the state. My opthalmologist almost never needs to prescribe it, so he's put me into the care of an infectious diseases expert, who uses this sort of medication much more often and can help me manage the potential side effects.

But right now I wait.

For better medication. For an expert to look at the MRI scan I just had. And for those bloody lab results from my biopsy!

Here's the kicker: if those lab results aren't conclusive, they have to do a much more intrusive biopsy, all the way to the retina.

And I'd rather not get another needle in my eye.

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