So, I had to get an injection in my eyeball the other day...

This is a picture of the veins in my right eye. I'm including this for comparison, and also because these pictures are goddamn awesome (but would be EPIC if I hadn't been taking them with an iPhone 4s...
A few weeks ago, I noticed a strange blurring in the vision of my left eye - nothing truly awful, just a little more difficult to read text and stuff. I had an optometrist appointment later in the week, so I waited for them to check it out rather than visit multiple times.

During the checkup, they told me I had a hemiretinal vein occlusion with macular edema. When asking for that at a level I could understand, apparently a couple of blocked veins in my eye had started leaking, causing fluid to settle over the retina.

And I would probably need a needle in the eye to treat it...

This is my left eye. You can see the difference from the first, all those dark speckles are blood. Also, apparently, the veins (in both eyes) are thicker than they should be. Strangely, I couldn't notice anything in the mirror, it's all internal.  

Anyway, when I went to the specialist they did all the fun stuff - drops in my eyes to dilate the pupils, other drops to numb the eyeballs, etc. Then they took some pictures. As each picture was being taken, my defense mechanism came to the front of my brain and took over. See, when I get nervous or worried (and honestly, out of everything in the world I am scared of just two things - heights and needles because I grew up in Australia where everything up to and including the rocks is trying to kill you) and dreading thinking about an injection in my eyeball I started to tell jokes and be more enthusiastically upbeat. I waxed verbose about the pictures, how awesome they looked, how they were like "planets with tentacles" and all sorts of other nonsense. Still, they were pretty cool. So I asked for some.

The tech taking the pictures said they had no email or print capabilities, but was happy to let me snap some from my phone. With my eyes being all goofed up from the drops, and my crappy phone (and honestly, a crappy photographer...) these were the best I could get.

This is the bad eye in colour. It's not quite as easy to see the blotches (at least to me, I'm colourblind) but doesn't this look awesome?! That's the inside of a fucking eyeball!

After all this, and some truly awful jokes that I can't even remember but were laughed at dutifully I was told to sit in the waiting room while they examined the pictures and evaluated where they would be impaling my eyeball with their Needle of Doom. Spoiler: They did.

The waiting room, which was empty when I'd arrived, had since then filled up with elderly folk. Like, there wasn't a single patient in there under 900 years old. Which makes sense I guess, but I've only just reached 40, so I felt a little like the odd one out. Still, they called me back in again after about half an hour, put me in a chair that reclined and...

More drops. Then some sort of gel. Then more gel, 10 minutes later. Then the doctor came in and cranked open my eyelid with some sort of device and told me to look at one specific point and not move my eyeballs (HARD TO DO considering there was a blindingly bright light above the chair and my pupils were the size of dinner plates) and then JAB! Less than a second later, he was done.

Total time in the specialist's office was 4 hours from start to finish, with the actual procedure taking the least amount of time.
I need to go back for at least two more treatments, a month apart. This MIGHT fix or lessen the current damage, but the treatment is more to stop it happening again.

The culprit? The villain of the story? The cause of all this?High blood pressure. Apparently it had been high enough that I got a block in the veins of my eye, which leaked because the blood had nowhere else to go. I'm now on blood pressure medication, and looking to get that down a bit. Since the start of the year, since I started actually trying to take care of myself and lose weight and eat better, all sorts of horrible things went wrong. My gall bladder up and died on me (the surgeon proclaimed that it had been dead "at least a week" when he removed it). I got fucking GOUT out of nowhere (seriously? I'd only ever heard of fucking gout in fantasy or medieval age novels). And now this. But I'll keep trying to be healthy, because I can't imagine where I'd be if I hadn't started to. Actually I can. Probably dead.
Take care of yourselves, kids, or you might end up with a needle in the eye.
And fucking gout.

PS: They wouldn't let the procedure be recorded, so no injection video. But I'm okay with that.