In other news, my eyes may be better. I saw my ophthalmologist, Dr D, this morning. After the de rigueur infuriating hourlong wait, he checked my eyes, and my vision is back to 20/20 and there are “no cells or [somethingorother] in the vitreous.”

This is good. But I’m just a bit startled and horrified to see, looking back at my posts here, that this episode has lasted seven months. Seven months not wearing contacts. Seven months of a daily eye drop regimen. A brief period where my pupil was deformed, into a kidney shape. (If you want to really freak someone out, take something they think they can rely on – like their pupils always being round – and mess that up.)

This morning, the pressure in my eyes was still elevated. Which is secondary to all the steroid eye drops I’ve been using. Which were to treat the condition of uveitis which is secondary to my cancer meds. Which are secondary to the cancer. Which going all the way back to its origin, could be blamed on the Sun. A medical mise en abîme.

Because the pressure is still up, Dr D was not going to be the one to tell me to stop taking the eye drops. Instead, I went out on a limb and told him I intended to stop, and he reluctantly agreed. I’m continuing on the beta blocker drops once a day, which should lower the pressure.

This is the thing about being a cancer patient treated with drugs too new to be widely familiar: you find yourself telling your very intelligent and highly qualified doctor or specialist that they don’t know enough, and they have to agree. “Between the two of us, we make one brain,” I told Dr D, regarding my current situation. He can worry, but in the end, they’re my eyes. I’m ready to try to go without the drops, and he can only stand on the sidelines ready to treat me if something flares up again.

In the meantime, the cancer drug combo is the ostinato, the constant, on top of which everything else can sit. Maybe one day I’ll stop those, too. For a good reason.

In the meantime, the legacy of this long episode with my eyes is a floater in the left one – a small transparent circle that rises and falls and whirls around my field of vision, only resting when I sleep. For seven months I have needed to use extra brain processing power (which I can ill afford), to discriminate that floater from actual things in the air. It’s a small spider in my vision, perpetually bobbing up and down on invisible string. I wonder if this is why I can’t seem to concentrate on anything.