Monday July 19th, 2021

The exercise:

Write about: night and day.

A new wildfire sparked between Osoyoos and Oliver shortly before I left work this afternoon. It grew rapidly and was spewing some pretty significant smoke as I was driving home. This resulted in what felt like night time to my left, where the sun was struggling to be seen through the smoke, and day time to my right, where blue sky could still be seen.

It also resulted in my car being covered with ash at 9 pm where it is parked, on the north side of our town house, in Penticton, despite the blaze burning some 50 km to the south.

I mean, there's also the huge fire burning near Okanagan Falls 20 km to the south, but I'm fairly confident this is from the new one.

Wednesday February 17th, 2021

The exercise:

Write about being: lost in the dark.

Wednesday June 2nd, 2010

The exercise:

The prompt: in the dark.

I was going to both explain what's going on with me and do a take on the prompt, but then the explanation got huge and I decided to just leave that as my take.

Mine:

The reason I'm off work until Friday has nothing to do with recovery time or needing to rest (though I probably could use the latter). No, it's because I have to avoid bright lights for the 48 hours following the surgery.

In a nutshell, they injected the medicine into my veins and it went everywhere. They used a laser to activate it where they needed to in my eyes (to seal a leaky vessel in each one - the condition is called CSR). The problem is that the medicine is light activated, not just laser activated. So sunshine, bright lights, all that good stuff will trigger it anywhere it happens to be.

Which, as I mentioned, is all over. So if I go out during the day, or sit under a bright indoor light, I get a severe sunburn.

So I'm living in the dark for the next couple of days. Which is making me want to write a vampire story. Don't worry, I shall be strong.

I'm waiting for my body to absorb the remaining liquid and then I get to see how much my vision improves. The issue before was mainly in my right eye and almost completely unnoticeable when I had both my eyes open. However if I closed my left eye everything went blurry - I'm looking forward to that not happening anymore.

I'd like to finish off by giving a big shout out to the Canadian health system. Apparently I'm walking around with a drug in me that costs $1700 per vial, so I'm pretty pleased I didn't have to pay a cent for it.