My recent journal entries have been hampered by a fear of being boring. For instance, I am in the midst of a three-day saga of attempting to get my car tuned up, and I haven’t written about it incase the story is dull. And Ian is coming to come to San Francisco to see me when I’m in the US, and aren’t I lucky to have such cool friends?

But then I think, nah, daylog, boring.

The thing is though, my life has been boring lately. I work, I hang out with my husband and Jeni and Meg, I sleep, I surf the internet and watch Buffy season three. (on DVD, a birthday gift from Kir’s parents. Don’t tell them I opened it a month early.) I get the occasional concerned email from Carob wanting to know what’s wrong with me because I never send her any email.

I have no idea what’s wrong with me. It’s just that kind of life lately.

So, if you find the following story boring, tough. From now on I am just going to write for my own sake, boring life and all.

The adventure of my eye:

I woke up this morning, and my left lower eyelid was swollen and painful. It hurt to blink. And it was really visibly swollen. I am not someone who gets panicky about my health. I figured it was nothing some hot compresses and maybe a course of antibiotics wouldn’t take care of. But I thought I should see someone to get the right antibiotic, since I am deeply paranoid about antibacterial resistance. So I called Meg, who is in fact a health care professional, told her the situation, and asked if I could stop by. She’s leaving for the US tonight, but she’s also a wonderful person, so she said I could come in at 11:30 and she’d look at it.

Then I went off to work. After taking a long morning shower, the swelling had gone down so much that Gulia and the long suffering driver didn’t eye notice my eye. But I went to see Meg anyway, because eyes are something we should take seriously. (so my mother always said) Meg looked at me, and sure enough, she said it was a minor bacterial infection. She told me to throw out my eye makeup and prescribed an antibiotic ointment and a hot washcloth applied to the eye four times a day.

The long suffering driver and I set off to get the ointment. To make life easier, Meg gave me two to choose from, but after three drugstores we couldn’t find either one. The central drugstores said you can’t find either of the medicines in Ashgabat. The long suffering driver suggested that I go to a Turkmen ophthalmologist, who could prescribe something that you can find in Ashgabat.

I agreed, and he took me to the medical center where his sister in law worked. We went with her to the ophthalmologist (For an infected eyelid. I know. Really, a GP kind of thing. But the GPs here are all pediatricians with two weeks of additional training.) She looked at my eye in great detail, and then we went out and she discussed my case with the long suffering driver, in Russian. All I could tell was that they were taking about drugs for me. Eventually they agreed on a tetracycline ointment, and some kind of sulfa eye drops. She gave him directions to a drugstore where we could find it. We left the office.

I thought we were walking his sister-in-law back to her own office before leaving. But we weren’t. We were going to a special treatment room, as the long suffering driver explained cheerfully to me. “You’re going to have eye ultrasound. It’s a very common treatment.” I was led into a little cubicle, with a grey machine and a chair in it. I was told to sit in the chair, and once I sat, a woman came and pulled these two metal arms out from the machine. There were two round plates on the ends of the arms, and she positioned them near my face. I had to sit there for ten minutes, and the plates heated up and warmed the air around my eye. In the beginning, she waved a metal wand around my head and the plates, but after a minute or so she left me to sit alone at the machine.

So I sat at the face cooking machine and wrote this journal entry in my head. After the machine, I paid 10,000 manat (fifty cents) for the treatment, and was finally able to leave. The long suffering driver and I found the eyes drops at one pharmacy, and he said he’d track down the other one without me. Meg says the drops and the ointment sound fine to her, and my eyeballs will not shrivel up or fall out of my head.

All’s well that ends well, I suppose.

PS - happy birthday, Gabriel Kramer!

<<|>>

You might have missed...
I’m not sure my ego has ever cycled as fast as it has lately. - 15 July 2004
shots - 12 July 2004
But that was long ago, and in another country. - 22 June 2004
I was getting bored with linear thought… - 09 June 2004
You told him we slept together before marriage? - 20 May 2004

USAID is one of many donors for the project I work for. The views expressed herein are the author’s own views and do not necessarily reflect those of the author’s employer or especially those of the United States Agency for International Development or the United States Government. And I mean it. I probably give the US government heart attacks.