Writing Eyes: My Experience With Dilated Pupils

 So I have a nevus in the retina of my right eye and it showed up there sometime in the last four years.

 Nevi are basically freckles in the eye, they can appear on the front of the eye, like in the iris, or they can be like mine and show up inside the eye. Like freckles, they are usually benign, and also like freckles, they can turn malignant.

 Due to it appearing recently and the fact that it's very close to the macula (vision centre) of my eye, my optician wanted to have a better look at it to make sure it was benign.

 This meant that she put tropicamide drops in my eyes to dilate my pupils to make it easier to see my retina.

 Yes, this stuff has the same basic function as belladonna, the fancy name for deadly nightshade.

 Since this was a thing that fashionable ladies did once upon a time to make their pupils look larger, I thought it would be a good idea to write about my experience of having ridiculously large pupils.

Is this pretty? I don't know.

  It doesn't kick in immediately, so when it started I was in Boots (regular Boots, not the Opticians Boots who put the drops in) buying vitamin pills and a new hairbrush, and the thing I noticed first was that everything between one and two arm lengths away was incredibly and unnaturally clear.

 Everything else was intensely blurry.

 I'm short sighted, so I'm used to things at a distance being blurry, but not my own cleavage being blurry and difficult to make out.

 Yes, I could not see my own boobs clearly.

 It was really weird.

 This also meant that I had a really hard time taking the picture above because I couldn't see what was on my phone without holding it at arm's length and my eyes look really dark when they're photographed in anything dimmer than direct sunlight. (I had to expose the shit out of that picture.)

 So I took about five pictures while unable to see if the camera had picked anything up.

 For the first half hour or so, I had this weird relationship with light.

 If I kept my eyes open for too long, I started getting a headache that was centralised in what I like to call 'the migraine warning area'.

 No wonder migraines show up in oldy timey fiction if people were doing this to themselves.

 The other thing that happened was that I kept getting after images of the weirdest things.

 One thing this happened with was a poster advertising half price frames where the frames themselves would singe themselves onto my retina for a few seconds. Which is odd as they were by far the darkest thing on the poster.

 I'm also pretty sure I got an afterimage of a large mirror at one point. It was very strange.

 After my appointment was over I had some shopping to do in my local town centre, which is a mid range activity most of the time, so I was too busy to really notice much for the next few hours.

 Well, apart from how weirdly difficult finding stuff in Lakeland was. Which was the first shop I went in and has been rearranged for Christmas stuff.

 Once I got home though, I found that sitting at my computer was giving me a mild headache and felt really uncomfortable for my eyes. I was about half way through the life span of the effects, so I chickened out and took a nap because everything was really bright.

 So bright, in fact, that I had to use a long sock as a makeshift blindfold because my room is white and closing my eyes only made it so that I couldn't perceive my surroundings but I could still see a lot of light.

 By the way, it doesn't look like my nevus will cause me any problem in the short term, but I have an appointment for proper eye doctors to look at it. Which may or may not change my lens prescription depending on if I need treatment and what that might be.

 So sadly I can't get new contacts for up to three months.

 Eye based drama aside, I hope this comes in handy if you want to write about Georgian era ladies or women from Italy back when this was in vogue.