As a software engineer, I could easily spend a couple of hours staring at a screen non-stop. My girlfriend often advices me to take a short break from time to time to give my eyes a rest, but I don’t really enjoy taking this action (Sorry T_T) , mainly because I do not want to be interrupted from my thought process when tackling a problem. Only until recently, when I have got some issues with my eyes, I realize how important the eyes mean to me.
It started off at a Tuesday, when my right eye starts to feel some pain whilst blinking and getting very red. I was in the office that day and the situation had gotten from bad to worse throughout the day. I then took the next day off, hoping it would miraculously heal itself, only that it didn’t. I could not open my right eyes as it gave me piercing pain. Even if I tried to only look with my left eye, it would trigger my right eye after 3 seconds, that I will then be forced to close my left eye to ease the pain (and it took around 5-10 minutes). So the only thing I can do is to lie on the bed doing nothing, other than sleeping and listening to some music/podcasts from my phone with the help from my girlfriend/Siri.
In the midnight, yet another sharp pain woke me up from the sleep. It was the dry eye symptom that I have been having on my right eye, amplifying the amount of pain that I was experiencing. We booked a virtual GP online, yet I would have to wait until 2 p.m. My girlfriend was worried that it might be something urgent and horrible that requires some immediate treatement, so she helped me to fill up some form from NHS, and it advised me to get help immediately.
Around 4 a.m., we grabbed an Uber and arrived at the nearest A&E. After a few hours in the ‘wait queue’—which, for me, is actually a good sign because it means my priority level isn’t critical —a doctor finally called my name. It turned out that the cornea of my right eye had a scratch mark for some reason, causing my severe pain. After applying an ointment and taking a rest from work for 4 days, it seems to have healed itself and I can finally see!
While I was lying on the bed, the voidness of being able to do nothing made me wonder about questions that I don’t usually care about. For example, when was the last time that I can lie on the bed without worrying about work related issues? If it were my girlfriend that had the same issue, would I be able to take care of here as well as she did? If I really lost my ability to see for the rest of my life, what would then happen to me? Most of them I still don’t have an answer tom, but an important lesson learnt for me is that, I have to take better care of myself and prioritize my health over my work. Your health is the foundation to everything including your work. It is like having some technical debts in your codebase that you know would impact the system one day, instead of applying some band-aid fix, we should look for some long term solution to tackle them down before we have to wake up at 4 a.m, right?
Shout out to my girlfriend who took care of me when I lost my ability to open my eyes temporarily. I don’t usually consider myself a lucky person in the traditional sense, as when I was playing DnD or other luck based games that invovles rolling a die, most of the time I got the exact opposite of what I wanted. Perhaps I have already spent most of my luck for meeting and being together with her, and I would pick her over anything anyday :)