STINK-EYE

(Or, Stop that, or you’ll go blind.)

Sometime last week, I had noticed that my left eye appeared to be a bit irritated.

My eyes will occasionally get slightly bloodshot, especially late of an evening. A drop or two of anti-redness eyedrops, and bingo! No more red.

But this was different. The redness was persistent. Nevertheless, I thought little of it until last Saturday, when we arrived in South Florida. By that time, my left eye - the oculus sinistrum, as the Eyeball-Croaker would call it - looked like a golf ball made of lean bacon, and it felt as though someone were shoving icepicks into it.

Oy.

We ate dinner alfresco that evening - SWMBO and I, accompanied by Aunt Marge - at a place in Hollywood called Argentango. The specialty there is a humongous skirt steak, grilled Argentine-style; I had the junior version, half the size of the original, yet still weighing in at 14 ounces. Buried in chimichurri, it was superb... but I was having a hard time seeing it, owing to the fact that I was wearing my sunglasses despite the sun having gone down.

The next morning, I stopped in at one of those drugstore walk-in clinics, figuring that I had come down with a case of conjunctivitis: the old Pink-Eye, scourge of elementary schools the nation over. And that’s the diagnosis the Doc-in-the-Box arrived at, using her handy-dandy Computer Diagnostickal Questionnaire. A bottle of antibiotic eyedrops, and I was on my way.

Not so fast, podnuh.

After several days of instilling drops every four hours, my left eye still looked like boiled shit... and felt worse. A filmy haze obscured my vision, rendering me useless for the trip home: SWMBO drove the entire 750 miles unassisted. (I don’t call her Iron Woman for nothing!)

First thing today, I went to see my own ophthalmologist. The good news was that, no, I didn’t have conjunctivitis. All of my paranoid anti-contagion measures were unnecessary, because what I have is not contagious.

I’ve got iritis, an inflammation of the iris and its surrounding tissues. Ouch.

All I can say at this point: Eyedrops - and dark glasses - are my friends. And I will be spending a lot of time with my friends over the next few weeks.