A NaNoWriMo Blog

Monday, November 21, 2005

Ouch

So you may be wondering where I've gone (or, based on the hit count, you may not have been). Well, last Tuesday morning I woke up to a shooting pain in my right eye. I've had this before, but this was about as bad as ever; I drove to work with essentially septuple vision in that eye, and my vision didn't improve during the day. That evening, my eye started to feel like something was in it; by the next morning, it was red and swollen and hurt constantly, growing worse with each blink.

Well, several trips to the optometrist later, I can tell you that I suffer from recurring corneal erosions, which means that occasionally, part of the top layer of my cornea pulls off with my eyelid instead of remaining attached to the rest of the cornea. Which is about as fun as it sounds.

Of course, there are all sorts of fun things with that, as you may expect--when you feel like you've got something in your eye 100% of the time, it's hard to think two sentences down the line, much less plan out your novel. So I simply lay in pain for several days, letting myself get out of the flow of the story and allowing the inertia that had previously been my ally to become my foe.

Oh well. I can't get the time back, but I'm only about 6,000 words behind. That's not great, but a 2,300 word a day pace should get the job done. Considering my plan has always been to write 15,000-20,000 words over Thanksgiving weekend, 50,000 should still be very attainable.

2 comments:

Robin said...

Ick.

Do they sew it back on?

Jeff Fecke said...

Happily, no. It grows back over the course of four or five days, although RCE means it doesn't grow back right, thus starting the cycle over again at some undetermined point in the future.

I can dump eye drops in to (hopefully) prevent a relapse, but I was already doing so; the two surgical options to prevent this in the future are either a laser removal of the top layer of the cornea--which would hopefully make it regrow as a piece that attaches correctly--or a procedure where they poke holes in my cornea in an attempt to "tatoo" the bad patch down by forcing the healing deeper into the cornea.

So neither sounds like much fun; of course, neither is an attack of RCE, so I probably will opt for one of the surgeries in the near term.