Geek Dad Report #7

I have a good excuse for my lack of writing, I promise. I apologize for my abrupt stopping in writing the Battlestar Galactica reviews, and last weeks Geek Dad Report.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been going through an assortment of tests so that my doctor can make a diagnosis on a problem I’ve been having. While, I’d rather not go into detail just yet as to what that specific problem is, I’ll find out at the end of the month for sure. Then, depending on the news, and what it means for myself and my growing little family, I may fill you readers in on the details. I will say that it involves my eyesight, or lack there of, we are trying to pin point exactly what is going on, that is all you need to know for now. If you are family, real-life or Internet friends and reading this, try not to feel too dissuaded in my ignoring you lately, I’ve been focusing on my core two things right now, Work and my family. I promise I’ll poke my head out of the cave that is my core being, just give me time.

Though, it is my ingrained ability I think to try to shed some light on dark times, and, for the sake of my own sanity, I’ll try to illustrate some of the humor of the last few dreadful weeks.

I think I’ll start off with my first visit to my doctor, where, after filling out my patient form wrong, forgetting a couple of big things. First, it was that that Yes, I did in fact have surgery in my lifetime (Wisdom Teeth), and Yes, I am hearing impaired/deaf (I had filled out No) I was already feeling like a total ass. After doing your standard, say the smallest letters you can read on the board schick, I was presented with a thing to over your eye, and told to look through the pinhole on it, and tell her what letter you can read. Somehow, I had misinterpreted what she said, and thought I was supposed to be looking for multiple pinholes, and proceeded to move the device around my face, looking for other pinholes. I couldn’t tell if my wife was laughing at my antics or not, my contacts were out, so everything was blurry. After fumbling through the test again with my opposite eye, searching for damn other pinholes than the ONE I could only find. She eventually took it away when I declared. “I can only find one pinhole to look through.”

After this fumble of a start to finding out the true extent of my vision problems, I felt a little dejected, my head has been swirling for the past couple of days, dwelling of the possible outcomes that these assortments of visits might create. I wasn’t focused, and probably just made things worse with my ineptitude as handling simple questions, I hadn’t even seen the doctor yet! I thank whatever divine entity you may believe in (or lack of entity, I guess you could call it SCIENCE!) that I have my wife, an amazing woman she is, asking questions that I forget, or carefully wording something as so I can remember to ask about something on my own that I had forgotten.

I am extremely pleased with my doctor, I don’t want to perpetuate a stereotype, or in any way seem racists, but I’ll be genuinely honest. I was relieved that my doctor was a younger Asian man, who had gone to Harvard, and then Columbia medical school, I had a feeling from just that, this guy wasn’t going to half ass anything. I was even more assured, that as we started talking, he whipped out a small tape recorder, and spoke everything into it, recording our session for later use. Honestly, nothing made me feel like that I was going to get this stuff truly figured out than him doing this, someone who knows what organization and research truly is all about. I have nothing but sincere faith in his abilities, his aura that he presents is that damn good, in a scary time as it is, he is the standard of calm and reason.

After we talked to him about the possible diagnosis, and what the options were, we had to schedule two more days of testing, and I would have to do one more test before I left that day. This test, was possibly the one that was the worse (so far). First, I’ll say this, I don’t mind getting shots in the arm at all, where I fall into wussy territory, is when I have to get a shot in the vein like you are drawing blood. They had to inject me with a fluid that would dye my eyes for some pictures of them. After trying to man it out in front of my wife, I took the shot in my left arm, and waited. I was told that this might make be feel a little nauseous, she was wrong, it made me feel like complete hell. First, I turned white as a ghost, complained of feeling woozy, my wife laughingly applied a wet towel to my head and neck. After a few minutes, and my neck drenched in my own sweat, I had to get out of the chair and lay down to which, I received juice! Horray! After spending a embarrassing minute on the ground, I collected myself, sat back in the chair and declared, I was ok enough to go through with the camera pictures and get this over with.

Then she said I had to do the other arm also. Most of this process was repeated, except that it ended with me throwing up into a garbage can, my wife joking at me, and I’m sure the nurse rolling her eyes at seeing a 27 year old man purge his gut after taking a shot in the arm. Needless to say, I did get the first round of tests complete, and now, next week I have quite possibly the most insanely awesome and weird evil scientist-sounding test imaginable. Though, to hold the suspense, I’ll write about that next week.

I’m hoping I’ll get superpowers out of it, we’ll see, and yes, it’s THAT awesomely crazy/cool.