“Emergency eye surgery.” Those are not happy words.

About a week and a half ago, I got a big floater in my right eye. I get floaters more often than most, but it’s never been a big thing, and it seemed to be breaking up on its own, like they do, so I ignored it through the GeekGirlCon show with the intent of going in to make sure it’s not the 3% of time that posterior vitreous detachment (harmless) leads to retina detachment (problematic) or tears (extremely problematic and can lead to blindness).

Monday morning it seemed to have got worse, and that was new, but I was making the appointment anyway, so I went in. Dr. Khan agreed from the symptoms that it was probably just ordinary stuff, but of course, the whole point of going down there is to get a look.

And yeah, it’s not. Dr. Khan transferred me immediately to a retinal specialist, who said it is PVD, but with an outright retinal rip, and I have two other spots in the same eye that are damaged, and very likely to lead to retinal rips. The damage in all cases is very old, and the sort caused by multiple head trauma events.

So I have emergency surgery tomorrow morning. They’d’ve done it today, but it wasn’t an option unless we moved to overnight at Swedish, and that’s actually pretty bad because they don’t have the specialised eye crews overnight, and we’re better off waiting ’till the morning. If all goes well, I’ll be fine – tho’ down a lot of money, despite coverage.

And that gets me to something I don’t talk about much. I don’t remember most of my childhood, mostly because of my broad-spectrum abuse history. Psychological abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, multiple abusers. It’s all kinds of fun.

In the extremely unlikely event that you know anything about my past, which almost none of you do, I want to make a point here of exempting my last guardian, whose initials were E.E.. E.E. was the closest to a decent parental figure I ever had, and none of this, none of it, is on him. This was all before his time.

The others, tho’… yeah. I’m not going to name names, because hi, lawyers. There’s one in particular here – I’ll call him Mr. B.

Mr. B was fond of academic rigour, in particularly through pain, in more particular through punches to the head. I have a bunch of healed but fortunately minor skull fractures from his particular breed of rigour.

I hadn’t heard from Mr. B in decades, until – now that he’s old and sick – he started cyberstalking me a couple of years ago. I blocked his accounts but he made new ones, until went so far as to reply to one of his over-the-transom missives from a donated, throwaway account, saying that okay, I know what he wants; I want to know who my birth parents were and how Mr. B and his associate Ms. A got ahold of me. His price was being “welcomed back into my life,” which is happening never, thanks.

So I can keep that out of my life just fine, thanks. And with the help of a therapist, I’ve managed to keep Mr. B and Ms. A out of my head, a lot of the time. (Ms. A has had the decency to disown me outright. Not fond of the queer, you see. Simplifies things, sometimes, doesn’t it?)

But apparently old blows can still cause physical harm, even today. I thought Mr. B had had his last shot at me, but apparently not. One more blast from the past, eh, Mr. B?

We’re going to fix that, tomorrow. With lasers.

It’ll leave me with limited vision for a couple of weeks, but hopefully will only really knock me down for a couple of days. So maybe I won’t be around for a bit.

Or maybe I’ll liveblog from the operating room. Who can tell?