The Shin-bone's Connected to the Knee-bone, And the Colon's Connected to the...Eyeball?

I went to the eye doctor today. It was very educational. If there had ever been a Jeopardy question like, "The unlikely body part influenced by the colon," I never would have guessed, "What is the eyeball?" But apparently, the colon and the eyeball can travel in each other's orbits. 

So, for example, the doctor told me that colon cancer frequently metastasizes into the eyeball. In fact, she told a story (perhaps apocryphal, but who cares?) about examining a patient's eyes and finding "mets" on his retina. Upon this discovery, she asked him if he'd had a colonoscopy. He replied with vague horror, "How far up can that thing see?" Awesome. Less awesome was the fact that his subsequent colonoscopy did, in fact, find colon cancer which had metastasized to his eye. 

And let us pause here for a moment and just note: I can handle tumors in my colon. I can handle tumors in my liver. If anything. having been forced to eat cow's liver as a child, liver actually seems like a very likely and extremely appropriate place for a tumor to form. But a tumor on -- or worse, in -- your eyeball?  No. Just no. If there is anything in the universe that should just be considered off limits, I would absolutely put "eyeball tumors" into that category. It gives me the willies just thinking about it. 

Happily, aside from a clogged tear duct, the eye doc didn't see signs of anything amiss in my eyes.

But that is not the only potential influence of the colon on the eye -- or at least my eye. One of the things my glasses do is correct an astigmatism in my right eye. Without them, my eye wants to naturally roll back into my head and stop working.* At least, that's what's supposed to be happening. What's actually happening now, though, is something a little different. 

In short, my right eye isn't really working anymore. My glasses force it to point in the general direction of what I'm looking at, but my brain is now mostly ignoring the input it gets from that eye. Eye doctors are usually pretty good at forcing both eyes to work, both independently and together. Today, though, anytime the doc set the machines to allow both of my eyes to work, my right eye would immediately wander off somewhere by itself.

As the doctor explained it, it's actually a fair amount of work for my brain to force my right eye to work and to process the incoming images. (The prescription for my my right eye is twice the strength of the left.) It's easier to just ignore that eye and pay attention to the left. And after a year of cancer treatments that generally leave me exhausted, my brain has stopped investing the energy necessary to deal with the right eye.

Which explains why I could process the 3D imagery when I saw Avatar however many years ago, but the last 3D movie I saw was just a headache inducing mess. 3D doesn't work so well if you've only got one working eye. 

But it could be worse. I could've had an eyeball tumor...


* At this point, I can actually control it. If I take off my glasses and focus on seeing clearly, my eye rolls back. Switch to blurry vision and it rolls back to pointing forward. Right up there with curling your tongue as a pointless party trick.