Lens Flare
I was diagnosed nearsighted when I was eleven. Contacts a little after 16. My vision was so bad that I didn’t have an alarm clock because I couldn’t read the numbers at my bedside. In 2004 I had LASIK surgery and one of the side effects is ghosts of light outside stars and the moon and headlights. The same is true of contact lenses so it wasn’t a great loss to me.
I do miss those nights when I was in high school with my thick glasses when we went out at night onto the golf course with our flashlights covered with red paper to see the best of the night sky. I’ll never see that now post-LASIK. I remember visiting my sister in rural California when I still had my glasses and the Milky Way was so bright. You could stand up and stare at the road of stars in the sky and it led you someplace you couldn’t define, deep in your soul.
We don’t have that back east in the US. It’s all tall trees and light pollution.
My heart has any number of scars over the years and contact lenses and LASIK and light pollution are far down on the list but still…go to your apple music or Spotify and dial up Max Richter. On the nature of daylight is the first one you listen to.
It’s hard to maintain stoicism really.
When you are a doctor with a weird health problem like fevers of unknown origin you consult all your friends, and they give advice. There was no advice that was better than my consultation with the fever of unknown origin clinic at the BIDMC in 2022. I saw the fellow for 60 minutes and then the attending. They did a physical exam and I didn’t have any arthritis or other serious problems. When I saw them I didn’t have the fevers, I was in a lull.
What had my many online and historical doctor friends wondered about? HIV, sexually transmitted diseases, autoimmune, cancer, infection, tick disease, psychological…
One friend recommended magic mushrooms for my depression. Another asked me if it was the vaccines (it began in 2019 so…no).
The actual fever clinic consultation got down to business and I have to say the fellow and the attending listened to me and spent 60+ minutes with me without downplaying my symptoms or questioning my experience. They had the following algorithm for unexplained fever:
cancer: all my recent cancer screening from pap smear to cologuard and skin checks were negative
autoimmune: so likely given the family history but all the major inflammation and rheum lab checks were totally normal. And rechecked. Normal again.
infection: this means both a smoldering infection and also an immune deficiency that might mean I had a lingering infection for no other good reason. I had no signs of smoldering infection and the tests of my antibodies and immune function were normal and my HIV test was negative.
I felt that the unexplained fever doctors listened to me and went down the checklist and I really didn’t have anything terribly serious or dangerous causing my problem.
Problem was I still couldn’t function as a full time psychiatrist with my fevers.
The light is bright but you still step forward into it. You still take a breath.