Asteroid field of vision

I have spent the majority of May feeling either ill, blind, or dizzy and it certainly wasn’t anything to do with any initial excitement of getting our new fridge.
After Ka’s little head on collision with a collapsing fridge door we had immediately visited the Currys website. Unfortunately we made a slight error of judgement. The fridge we ordered doesn't fit milk. Of all the fridges looked over online, we inadvertently opted for a model that doesn't fit milk.
A fridge that doesn't fit milk. What kind of idiot designed that?
What kind of idiot buys that?
We've had to remove a shelf, from halfway down the inside of the door, off it’s plastic moulded brackets, in order to fit a normal bottle of milk in the door's largest, lower shelf. The middle shelf fits snugly further up the door but has no brackets and thusly cannot hold more than the weight of two spring onions (or sibies) inside it making it very little use whatsoever.
In fact, we're struggling to fit all our usual copious amounts of food in the rest of the fridge. It all seems so much smaller. We can barely fit the salad bowl into it. It’s now a minor task getting the butter out the fridge. Before you nonchalantly reached in, pulled the tub out and flung it on the worktop, now you now have to move things to the side, take things out, balance yoghurts on tomatoes, make sure you don’t hit the door’s bracketless middle shelf and reach to the back of the refrigerator in order to pull the tub out.
Never panic buy household appliances online. Always wait until you can go along to the actual shop, the large open plan shops that make even washing machines look sexy. Up the back, behind the washers and the ovens, are the fridges, where you should open the doors, look inside, admire the cleanliness and check for a decent sized milk shelf.
Okay, there are factors which make an online purchase a little more attractive. No need to travel anywhere. No need to salivate over televisions you cannot afford. You don’t have to bother telling the usually grinning customer service folk to piss off as soon as you walk through the automatic doors and you certainly don’t have to put up with them trying to talk you into buying yearly guarantees for when ‘something goes wrong’ (that will always make me highly suspicious). Not seeing you appliance in the flesh, or it’s plastic coated, thermally insulated form, in this case, can go against you, especially when it turns out to be smaller than predicted. A bit like the opposite of what happens when you go out for a date with someone from match.com. The person you end up greeting at your table turns out to be a very different size, weight and perhaps even age, than the picture advertising themselves on their profile page. In fact, I’m sure those kind of match.comer’s could put away more food than our wee fridge can.
In the following weeks I started suffering a variety of symptoms consisting of various ailments ranging from dizzy turns and headaches to stomach problems (the polite term) and seeing things. Strange, blurry, out of focus shapes, floating around in my field of vision. My stomach was twisting and turning the whole time and at one point, during one day at work, I felt like puking one moment only to nearly collapse of dizziness the next merely sitting at my desk.
All very weird. So I paid my Doctor a visit who basically couldn’t see anything wrong with me at the time and suggested a possible allergic reaction. To me this was an unlikely reason as I usually felt worse in the office. This would make it an allergic reaction to work, something that a lot of other people seem to suffer from.
Great, I thought, what’s going to happen next? Next I’m going to be claiming benefits and appearing on Jeremy Kyle.
Still suffering with the symptoms in the following days I considered the opticians and made an appointment for Saturday morning, expecting my prescription to have changed, thus accounting for the strange, floating dots in my vision and the headaches. How it would explain the stomach pains I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t aware of anyone suddenly having an urge for a toilet pan whenever their vision changed. I suppose it can be quite scary but not to that extent surely.
So I popped down to the opticians on the Saturday morning and optometrist, a chirpy young girl in a grey cardigan, put me through the various tests in which I click buttons on seeing lights, read letters from a projected slide and get ‘pissed’ in the eyes. A rather uncomfortable device which tests your eye pressure. You rest your chin on a pad and look into the dark depths of a rounded black box through a glass lens and suddenly get air spat into your eyes. A test which I’m not afraid to admit, made me jump everytime, like watching John Hurt looking down into that egg again.
The Optometrist then had a thorough look at my eyes after dropping an eye drop, known as Tropicamide, into each eyeball and letting it settle, or sting, for around ten minutes. After administering the eye drops she advised not to drive for at least an hour which I shrugged at casually finding no particular crazy effects going on and quietly certain there’d be no problem in driving home straight after. Following a good ten minutes of looking around in each eyeball, the Optometrist informed me my prescription seemed unchanged but I did have something very interesting going on in my eyes which she’d only ever seen twice before.
Asteroid hyalosis. Asteroids? In my eyes?
“It’s quite nice to look at”, she told me. “It’s like looking into a snowglobe that’s been shaken up”. More like stars than asteroids to the optician’s viewpoint the condition is apparently like looking into a star filled night sky which shifts and circles around, glimmering in the moonlight.
Pleased that I had been able to entertain the Optometrist with my starry eyes for the morning I went to leave unconvinced but not before she insisted on putting me through the eye pressure test again, probably just to amuse herself for a little longer as I jumped and spasmed on the other end of the eye blowing machine again. I suspect she may have been filming me with her mobile phone in order to post it on YouTube for a laugh for all her Optometrist pals.
Afterwards, she insisted my eyes would be fine and I went on my way, almost banging into someone on the way out the shop and then realising I could barely see. Pretty soon I was wondering around the shops in the town centre like a confused Mr Magoo, everything around me blurred, out of focus and melting in and out of my field of vision. I couldn’t see a thing and I certainly couldn’t drive. The blurriness lasted for around an hour but before that hour was over I had to make my way home. I had a Wedding to get to and I was running late.