Sunday, November 02, 2008

How very unaccommodating!

I wasn't able to do much on the computer since Friday afternoon, as I was being prodded and poked with sharp things around my eyes. Not terribly pleasant, but I came away from the afternoon at the hospital having learnt a little more about the effects of chemicals on the human body!

They had to do a fairly routine exam to measure the shape of my eyeball, but in order to do this with the correct calibration the nurse put in some eyedrops of what I have now determined was presumably a cycloplegic (probably homatropine), which inhibits accommodation (the focusing of the eye by changing the lens' shape) and causes mydriasis (the excessive dilation of the pupil).

A few minutes after putting the eyedrops in, it started becoming harder and harder to focus on things less that a couple of feet away. Slowly my field of vision altered such that everything but the very far was a blur and the light started to hurt my eyes.

It was only after they had done their needling that I got home (helped by a friend), a little shaken, that I looked in the mirror and to my blurred surprise saw my pupils were hugely dilated and unchanging in the presence of bright lights. I had to spend the next day staying away from sunlight which caused me to squint a great deal, though I'm now optically back to normal, even if the original reason I went to the opthalmologists has not improved. Anyway, of course I got a photo of my halloween eyes, though nobody was able to appreciate them as I was sat alone in a dark room listening to That Mitchell and Webb sound.

Cycloplegia

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

http://www.allenspiegelfinearts.com/mckean_death.jpg


eeek.

hope you get better.

Unknown said...

oof! I hope it won't come to that :-S

VIVA LA VIDA said...

wow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Que midriasis tan bárbara, como pudiste estar dos días así????