The purpose of this blog is to communicate with family and
friends about our lives in Oxford, so here's the story about the hospital. On Friday, Meyer started complaining in a
more forceful way about seeing double.
Apparently, it had started on Wednesday, but he wasn't really sure of it
until Friday afternoon, when he was seeing two completely distinct images of
everything, growing farther apart the farther they were from him, and worse on
the right side than the left. I was
planning to wait until Monday to figure out how to get him to see a doctor, but
Lisa spoke to her sister Leslie (the nurse) and she was pretty confident that
the potential worst-case scenarios justified a trip to the emergency room. Our neighbor (and friend from University of
Chicago days) Sarah rushed over in her pyjamas to drive us to the emergency
room of the John Radcliffe hospital, which by weird coincidence has both a
world-renowned children's hospital and a well-respected eye hospital.
We arrived at about 9:00 PM, and after some confusion about
whether we qualify for the National Health Service (we don't), we watched all
of Shrek in the pediatric waiting room.
We then saw a (junior) doctor who said it was probably nothing, and was
ready to discharge us, a (slightly more senior) doctor who was slightly more
alarmed, and then a (more senior doctor) who (after talking to "her
boss" on the phone) decided she wanted to keep us overnight "for
observation." After a relatively
unsatisfying conversation about how we don't qualify for NHS, and so would
prefer to go home unless observation is "absolutely necessary," we
spent the night on a small children's ward, which was actually really
nice. Meyer and I spent a while talking
about the mural on the wall of the ward (why would an ice cream truck have a ketchup
dispenser?) and read our books. Meyer
had a new graphic book about Wittgenstein, which he was reading despite the
double vision. At midnight or so, right
before we went to bed, I gave him a page from my calendar so he could frenetically
write down some thoughts he was having.
The next day, his Wittgenstein notes made slightly less
sense than they had the night before. We
spent a leisurely morning eating some pastry at the surprisingly good cafe and
waiting to see the pediatric consulting doctor.
When we did, she scheduled a CT Scan, and sent us over to the eye doctor
to look at Meyer's eyes. Meyer did a
great job putting up with a really junior doctor kind of messing up putting a
needle in his arm to inject contrast (which ended up being unnecessary). We had cake in the afternoon, and got out of
there by late afternoon, after hearing that the CT Scan turned up nothing
unusual at all. We were back on Monday
for more meetings with eye doctors and pediatricians, and came away with a pair
of glasses to correct the double vision (but only when Meyer looks directly
ahead of him). Given that they're the
unisex all-sizes pair lying around, they look weirdly good.
Today (over a week later), the double vision appears to be
largely gone. No real explanation, but
we'll take it if it stays this way.
School tomorrow!
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