my blown pupil

i took some vision tests at an ophthalmologist’s office the other day. i do this every few years because of some weird thing that happened to my left eye in portland.

they only dilated my left pupil, so it got huge and weird. the nurse took me into a dark room and had me put my face into a machine. he told me he was going to take some pictures of the inside of my eyes.

“see the green star in the black field? look directly at the green star and don’t blink.”

i looked directly at the green star and didn’t blink.

“i love stars,” i said afterwards, though i don’t think he heard me.

the doctor looked at the pictures of the inside of my eyeball. he said: “you had some trauma there a long time ago, but it is not active anymore. it is just a scar from the past.”

to which i replied: “yeah baby . . . you can say that again!!”

apparently my left eye is completely fine. however, a lot really has happened to it in the past.

TO WIT:

i have a scar on my left eyebrow because one time i slammed my face into a doorframe. my eyebrow split open. see here:

. . . and long before that, back in baltimore, an ant fell out of a tree and landed directly in my eyeball. it dug its mandibles into my eye and its segmented body broke off, leaving the head embedded beneath the gelatin outer layer. it was horrifying. i had to go to the ER and sit in front of a gigantic lighted magnifying glass and have a very talented doctor remove it with needle-tipped tweezers. he had to literally “push” on the surface of my eye with the tweezers to coax the dead ant head out. one of the nurses and my girlfriend at the time cried as they looked on. see here:

anyway i wouldn’t recommend any of it.

and i guess i still have 20/20 vision, so there’s that.

(p.s. in my novel INJURY & AFTERMATH, unlicensed private investigator rayon starpuncher’s eye begins to malfunction because of an experimental medication he took to pay his rent. and so inexplicably he begins to see the future and past overlaid on the present, which of course causes him to go completely insane. hmmmm. yeah~)