An Educational Day at the SCCA, Lesson 2: Xeloda and the X-Box Don't Get Along

There's, of course, a raft of questions the PA asks me every time I see her. Changes in this? Changes in that? Dizziness? Falls? Appetite? Pain? Blah blah blah. She takes notes on a piece of paper that, if my estimates are correct, runs three pages of single-spaced type and she's making notes in the margins and circling words. By the time we're done, I'm really tired of talking about my insides.

One of the things she asks about is my eye, and I realized that this time I had something to say in that I used to be able to be pretty monomaniacal with my eyeballs -- I could spend six hours playing my X-Box, or reading or whatever, without any noticeable impact -- but that's all changed. The last time I tried to play a video game, after fifteen minutes my eyes were all painful and blurry and I had to stop.

Today I learned that this is because the Xeloda basically dries out your entire body. Your skin, your mucous membranes and your eyeballs. None of it is fond of Xeloda. 

Unfortunately, in the case of your eyes, the solution is to use eye drops. In my case, this is pretty much impossible in that it takes about four extra hands to get a drop into my eye. My eyes do not like to be touched, and I have never been able to self-insert an eye drop in my life.* So instead she suggested I lay a wet rag over my eyes for few minutes.

Frankly, I'm thinking I'll just hold off on the video games for awhile.

* I'd rather perform surgery on myself -- and have -- than try to insert a contact lens.