Medical advancements

Imagine going in a panic half an hour early to your eye doc appointment because you’re not sure which suite it’s in. Imagine getting on the elevator and there’s a sign.

The eye doctors are on the second floor.

The optometric clinic is on the seventh floor.

AWESOME, I know it’s a specialist so I go to the second floor. I’m greeted by someone who examines my services card closely and then tells me to sit down. Within about two minutes (it’s still 20 minutes at least before the appointment time) I’m getting pictures taken of my eyes. I sit down and just as I pull out my pen to write a poem about how people in health care settings don’t wear fucking masks (all the staff were masked thanks), my name gets called again and I get a basic eye test and hand over the list of medications they asked me to prepare WHICH I HAD ON ME because I have a care sheet on Google docs, and then I barely sit down and have to get up again when they call my name to freeze my eye and bounce a pencap off it a couple of times (what it sort of felt like) and then the dreaded drops, which have by no means worn off. Then I get stuck in another room while the doc, a Desi woman in her late forties, takes a good long look inside my eyes. She is happy with the results and says my eyes are about as good as they can be for my age, to watch my sugars, and to expect my eyes to change from day to day with my sugars. She told me to use hot compresses and to clean my eyelids more thoroughly and suggested eye drops.

Got there by cab, walked from the Professional building to the cab stand at 6th and 6th (was thinking longingly of having a coffee and croissant at Waves, but oh well, why should I clog some poor bastard’s toilet) and then went home by cab as well.

The medical advancements I’m twittering about were the fact that everything ran like a machine, I got good and thorough care, and everybody patient-facing was masked, polite, competent and efficient. I JUST AIN’T SEED NUTHIN LIKE IT BOYS SINCE BEFORE THE PANINI!! (internet speak for ‘the pandemic)

TL;DR my eyes are fine, that eye doc practice runs like clockwork.

 

Long COVID testing regime

List of Long COVID tests from Lifelabs, BC, April 2023

Someone ACTUALLY POSTED ‘It’s a fine spring day in Saskatchewan’ on one of the video social media sites; it shows a my kind of fine looking young white man trying to pour coffee, which emerges from the carafe at about a 30 degree angle in a fifty-knot gale. With snow. While he is inadequately dressed for the weather. While smiling charmingly. It would take me longer to figure out how to cross post it than describe it, so I described it.

Eye test today. I will be getting the dreaded ‘drops’.