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Post by magnusgreel on Apr 29, 2012 10:14:50 GMT
Took me 10 years to get a diagnosis, and I'm not even sure if it's the correct one. It responds somewhat to indomethacine, but it's still there. Most of the time, my right eye feels like it's about to explode out of my skull. Fun times. It's outrageous that no doctor would look into it for you! I want to express solidarity with you over your eye nightmare, without "I'm so, so sorry..." Words failing. There should be ways of finding out what's going wrong inside that eye socket area, but if there are, it takes an interested doctor to order them. (I'm sure you covered glaucoma.) I've seen supposed scans of my eye sockets. (X-rays, MRI) You can barely make out that there's an eyeball or eye socket in the picture at all, or at least they seem incapable of more detail than that. I think some bright spot or smudge is supposed to indicate a tumor, which seems to be all they really have in mind. Do a scan, eliminate cancer. A doctor can do that in his/her sleep. In my presence, doctors never seem to "wake up". They somnambulate through appointments with me. I've now learned that they rely on feeble, sketchy, distorting, simplistic notes taken by the intake person, too, rather than listening themselves. Oh, and ophthalmologists refuse to believe that any eye disorder exists which can't be observed by simply taking a brief look in the eye with one of their scopes. No visible, obvious growth is supposed to mean hypochondria. The last ophthalmologist just refused even to make any reference in words, to the eye nightmare I came to her about. She kept evading, as if her contempt kept her from saying anything that might legitimize the problem. She said my eyes were dry, and I could use some eye drops. I said fine, but are we going to look further into this 30-year-old eye condition, with scans, tests, etc.? She said: I've diagnosed you with dry eyes... that's my diagnosis. Imagine, with this light sensitivity, what the trip there was like... and I just had to get up and wait again in the waiting room with something over my eyes, for the taxi home. All for nothing. This is typical.
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Post by magnusgreel on Jul 20, 2012 1:02:59 GMT
I finished "The Way of All Flesh" by Samuel Butler, an attack on Victorianism that he didn't dare publish in his lifetime-- and now I'm on a collection of Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, or something like that. Those mountains are in Antarctica, where he placed ruins of an alien civilization from millions of years ago.
After this, next up are "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison, and a book on the surrealists, the 'philosophers' and writers rather than the artists.
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Post by primsong on Jul 21, 2012 2:48:08 GMT
The mountains of Antarctica are prime real estate for writers, it's so convenient to have someplace right here on Earth that's still inaccessible and mysterious yet not underwater.
I'm working my way through Plutarch's Lives at this point, finished up the various Greeks and am on the Romans, including my old favorite from that era, Cicero. Great stuff, well written, I'm quite enjoying it. Plato's Republic is next, I may need doses of lighter fluffiness along the way to get through that one, though.
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Post by magnusgreel on Jul 21, 2012 20:18:02 GMT
For now, I'm avoiding anything not originally written in English because it just seems far-fetched that you'd still be getting the same book with a completely different set of word choices in another language... I'll get to ancient Greek things eventually I suppose.
I've thought that a great place for a fictional (or real) ancient, destroyed (or not) civilization would be in that bit of India that's been pushing itself under Tibet for ages, raising Tibet into an incredibly high plateau, and creating the Himalayas. There's a very deep river canyon in Tibet that may reach down a large part of the way down... You couldn't expect much to have survived, but that's where the imagination comes in.
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Post by magnusgreel on Oct 18, 2012 0:31:48 GMT
Lately I've listened to three Kurt Vonnegut books, Player Piano, Cat's Cradle, and God Bless You Mr. Rosewater. Cat's Cradle has a great SF premise: the invention of a form of ice that is crystalized differently so that its properties are different, and it freezes at a very very high temperature, and is toxic. A small sample is dropped into the ocean and the world freezes almost instantaneously. There, I gave away the end, but I don't remember the last time someone read a book based on a review of mine...
"To the Lighthouse", Virginia Woolf. I guess there was at least some reason to be afraid of Virginia Woolf, since the first time around, for the first 100 "pages" or so (it's on tape, but they give page numbers), the book seemed practically psychadelic to me. I couldn't follow. It turns out she was switching from the point of view of one character's thoughts, to another's, to another's, without warning, rapid-fire. Once I got that, I could start over and follow things.
She seemed to be more "about" subjective thoughts, feelings, ways of experiencing, rather than plot. Well so am I, I guess.
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Post by Maggadin on Aug 27, 2013 23:30:43 GMT
Ah, the sweet relief of deleting The Time Traveler's Wife from my hard drive.
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