Eye balls
There continue to be a lot of curve balls this year. A couple weeks ago we learned that my guinea pig Ivy had an abdominal mass, and we ended up needing to do an emergency spay. This is normally pretty routine with dogs and cats, but for small pets it's extremely risky and depending on what they find for emergency spays, they may not recover. As we saw with Archie last year.
Thankfully, she came out of surgery and bounced back quickly! It felt like the best news we've had all year (although I would've taken her not having a tumor in the first place too). She's a small creature, but she's tough. She even had babies when she was only 6 months old, before she was abandoned with them in a box outside. She's a trooper!
Meanwhile, since starting my new medications, I've been having trouble with my eyes. My right eye gets bloodshot almost every day and I regularly have tension headaches and light sensitivity, so much that I can't even look at a TV from across the room without wearing sunglasses. I've never really gotten headaches in my life, so the sudden onset seems to indicate that it's a side effect. There was one day where it was so bloodshot at night that I couldn’t fall asleep for hours. Eye drops didn’t help, and eye mask didn’t help, and I just kept thinking about how I could feel my swollen eyeball under my eyelids whenever I closed my eyes. I ended up taking a sick day because I got so little sleep and the idea of staring at a screen seemed awful. Later in the afternoon I tried drawing with an eye patch, but that really takes the wind out of my sails. Depth perception is way trickier with one eye, as you might imagine.
I spoke with my rheumatologist who recommended I make an urgent appointment with a rheumatology specializing ophthalmologist, but the appointment isn't until a month from now. He said that if that happens, I should just go to the Mass Eye & Ear ER and have an ophthalmologist look at my eyes day-of. There are many causes of a bloodshot eye and it's not worth taking any risks just because of scheduling. So yesterday my eye was again acting up and we made the trek downtown in the car. I was there for four hours and had a complete eye exam, which I've never had in my life. They asked when my last eye exam was and I said, "Uhm... never? I have 20/20 vision..." Really I had a few eye exams as a kid while on the same meds (which can cause longterm vision damage so they regularly monitor to stay ahead of it), but I think they were just basic look-in-the-machine exams. I was only 5 at the time though so I really don't remember.
During intake, they asked if I have had any falls, which reminded me to address that I have vasovagal syncope and it can show up for random reasons. Typical causes like blood tests and low blood sugar, but also more curious causes, like crowds, cold temperatures, smoke, hot temperatures, reading something grotesque, and not being able to sit down. They asked if it's triggered by people touching my eye and I said that I guess I wouldn't know until I tried it.
You can guess what happened next. The doctor gave me eye numbing drops to do a pressure test, and the instant I felt my eyes go numb and heard her say, "Now I'm just going to gently press on your eye", I started getting tunnel vision. After the 30 seconds that the test lasted, I told her I was starting to feel vasovagal and she reclined my chair, and a nurse and attending came in with cold wet towels to put on my forehead and neck. My blood pressure dropped down to 80/50 and they had to get me to actively breathe in and out because my heart rate was so low. I think I lost consciousness for a few seconds and came to while the attending shined a light in my eyes and asked if I knew where I was and if I could state my birthday. It took me about 10 minutes to feel better and they gave me some cold cranberry juice in the meantime. Certainly nothing that I haven’t experienced before, but always a little traumatizing.
Of course it wasn't over though. After that, I still had the majority of the full eye exam to go, so next had dilating drops. Again, this is all stuff I've never experienced before and without any eye problems in the past, getting drops feels really foreign, not to mention the added sensation of the specific drops in question. I started getting tunnel vision again, but luckily, after a brief machine exam, they needed to let me sit for a half hour while the drops went into effect, so I just sat in the dark room, reclined again, and tried to rest.
The rest of the exam went fine, and it was really interesting to see the different tools used to look into the back of the eye and examine the nerves and fundus. It was so peculiar seeing a bizarre but crystal clear refracted image of the fundus; I thought I was seeing things when I realized I was seeing my own eye blood vessels! This is all very novel to me but I'm sure everyone else has experienced this multiple times. Not being able to see from my face to 5 feet in front of me was troubling though; I figured out how to do talk-to-text to let Chris know when I was done.
The results were encouraging; my eyes are structurally perfect, vision still 20/20 so headaches aren't a sign of needing glasses. Though the next step may be neurological diagnostics, perhaps including an MRI. I've had a couple at age 5 and age 12, because the disease originally changed the shape of my skull. The attending explained that when headaches and eye problems are not caused by the eye itself, the eye is attached to the brain so that's the next place to look. And while that might be a big jump in general (ie could it just be dry eye or side effects?), given my type of scleroderma, it's better to make that jump early and rule anything serious out. Which I appreciate.
On the brighter side, Chris is slowly feeling better. He still gets bouts of chest tightness and shortness of breath, but since it's now been going on for 3 months, he feels he has identified a trend that it comes every couple weeks or so, but the severity decreases each time. He's working on building his strength with chest exercises and hopes to start going back to work once a week in August.
As for art-related topics, which I haven't posted about in ages, I've officially completed 12 pages of the chapter. I had hoped to complete the first 18 pages by August (since the first 18 in this chapter are the most tedious, at 16 panels/page), but I hadn't accounted for all of the recent crises so I'd say I'm doing alright considering. I was going at a pace of a page a week, but now it's a page every 2 or 3.
Above are two panels that I like a lot; the first taking place at night so a lot more shading. You'll see that the first shot is violet instead of blue-violet. This is because caran d'ache doesn't make the exact shade of blue violet that I was looking for, so each time I have one of these darker panels, I draw in violet first, and then go over with Prussian blue (one of my favorite pigments in oils!) I really like the split complementary color palette of goldenrod, green, and blue-violet, and violet just looked too juicy for the subdued tone I'm looking for.
I made a time lapse of a few recent panels on Saturday. I think I was subconsciously remembering techniques from my ninth grade drawing class. I don't remember doing tracing in that class, but do recall using graphite paper (kind of like carbon paper) at some point in that class so we must have. I think we may have used similar techniques in my sophomore printmaking class in college too, when doing etchings? For this, I traced a setting I needed to draw two more times by using a tracing paper, and then made my own graphite paper by shading the back with a 2B graphite pencil. It worked really well! Hard to see on camera but just enough to go right over it with colored pencil and not need to go back with an eraser that much. Before this, whenever I had a repeat background I was using a ridiculous system of measuring and transferring and it simply wasn't going to be scalable. Maybe I'll invest in some actual graphite sheets next.
