My Little Eye Adventure

I don't fully remember arriving in Malaysia. I remember bits about the airport in Hong Kong, and those mostly had to do with me breaking down. What had started as a mild irritation in my left eye had developed into a full-blown infection. Still believing I had viral conjunctivitis (I had diagnosed myself online, and indeed the symptoms seemed to fit), I figured it was just a matter of time before it would clear up. I was no stranger to conjunctivitis; I had had it years before (the bacterial kind). I remember redness, the runniness, the feeling that something was stuck under my eyelid—all unpleasant things. What I didn't recall was the pain. I was in severe pain.

Chris had to lead me like a blind person. I was completely dependent on him. This was mostly due to the fact that I couldn't open my left eye in bright light. Any light would cause stabbing pain; I’m talking normal daylight, any overhead light, even the light from my Kindle. Walking around with one eye continually shut wasn't much fun. Not being able to make eye contact with anyone, I probably looked like a right grump. I didn't care though. All I could get through my brain was “Please make this pain stop.” I slumped over the table where Chris and I had had our lunch and started crying. “Why does it hurt so bad?” I asked. This didn't seem so much like conjunctivitis anymore.

I broke down a few more times at the airport, as I was helpless to know where we were going. I couldn't follow signs, I couldn't help Chris with anything, I was probably acting like a child. When I couldn't read my book, I threw it in frustration. When we seemed lost in the airport, I just sat down and cried. I wanted to pull myself together, but I had spent the last few days doing that, convincing myself my eye infection was nothing serious. But the pain was now continuous. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't even close my eyes to escape the pain. It was like something was stabbing my eyeball over and over again. Pain like that takes over everything. It takes over your rationale. It takes over your personality. It takes over every normal function of your life.

We must have flown from Hong Kong to Malaysia, but I don't remember it. I think I curled up in my seat with my eyes closed, but didn't sleep. Any conversations with Chris had ceased. I could sense he was unhappy with the situation, but there was nothing to be done short of going to a doctor. We had chosen not to go the doctor route in Hong Kong, probably due to my self-diagnosis. We had visited a pharmacy at the airport. The girl there wasn't able to do anything, she wasn't a doctor. She had sold us alergy medication, which may have helped my runny nose, but did nothing for my runny eye.

I don't remember touching down in Kuala Lumpur or going through customs. The only thing I do remember was the taxi ride, and that was because it was so horrendous.

Late Arrival

Our plane had landed sometime around 1:00 in the morning. We had booked a private room at a guesthouse in Chinatown, Kuala Lumpur. As far as I knew it wasn't going to be a long drive. I was looking forward to a soft bed and laying my head down. Staying upright and somewhat alert was an exhausting process. I wanted nothing more than to totally tune out.

The taxi driver seemed a nice young chap. I thought he spoke enough English to understand our destination. He drove off confidently, so I thought, taking us in the direction of Kuala Lumpur. About an hour later he pulled over in some neighbourhood. We had seen the lights of the Petronas Towers, so at least we knew we were in the right city. However our driver was making phone calls. He didn't know our destination. I distinctly remember telling him “Chinatown” and him going, “Okay okay,” and driving off again.

We drove around in circles, up and down the empty streets of Kuala Lumpur. On maybe a different night this might have been entertaining, but not after the kind of day we had had. Chris was visibly getting pissed off. He kept trying to instruct the guy, but the guy was like “Okay okay,” with nothing getting through to him.

Eventually, after driving around in circles, the driver pulled back onto the tollway. Passing by numerous signs pointing towards the city, we headed out into the darkness. “He's taking us back to the airport,” Chris said, losing more of his patience. Finally he leaned forward and said, “Listen, if you just let me fucking drive this thing, I'll get us there. You don't fucking know where you're going.” I told Chris to back off, but I was getting nervous. This wasn't much fun at all, especially now that we were heading out of Kuala Lumpur. I was fully on guard. Our driver had been driving us around for over two hours. He had been on his phone numerous times, talking in a language we couldn't understand. Now he was paying a toll, taking us out into the darkness of the countryside. At 3:00 in the morning, all kinds of scenarios can go through a Westerner's head. He's taking us somewhere to hold us for ransom, was one of my thoughts. Or, he's going to mug us and then kill us. These seemed perfectly feasible.

“Chinatown,” I nearly shouted at him. “Don't you know where Chinatown is?” Suddenly, instead of the usual “Okay okay” we’d been getting, he went, “Chinatown. I know Chinatown. Back in Kuala Lumpur.” I wanted to clap my hands. Brilliant. Why was he only understanding this for the first time when we had been saying it all along?

He still had to turn around, which wasn't easy on the tollway. We went miles out of the way so he could turn back around, and then he had to pay the toll all over again. He was clearly upset with himself, which, frankly, was a relief to me. At least he wasn't selling us to kidnappers.

We arrived in Chinatown around 4:00 in the morning. We were dead tired and still didn't know where we were going. Our packs were heavy, and I was very near to crying again as we blindly walked the streets. Finally we came upon a group of Chinese eating at a restaurant. One of the men was clearly drunk, but lovingly clapped a hand onto my shoulder. “Please watch bag,” he said. “I only worry for you.” This was even more disconcerting, being lost in the middle of the night. Chinatown did look rough with all its dark alleys, especially at this strange hour. I was afraid someone was going to pop out of the darkness with a knife and slash our bags open.

Thankfully we were pointed in the right direction and in no time located our hostel. We were lucky reception was still open (though we got a reproving look, having arrived three hours later than we had indicated online) and were given a room to ourselves. The room was heaven, with all the comforts I had hoped for. I flung myself on the bed, so exhausted I could have died. It wasn't just the physical exhaustion, it was mental and psychological as well. I thought for sure I would just curl into a blissful sleep right then and there and drop into oblivion. The thing was—I couldn't. My eye hurt even worse when it was closed, scratching and scraping up against my eyelid. It seemed so unfair. I couldn't escape from it. And if it was at all possible, it was actually getting worse.

Desperation

Our room had no windows, so there was no sunlight to indicate the time. This felt unnatural. Having arrived at 4:00 in the morning, we could have slept for two hours or ten. Waking up was a surreal experience. Thankfully it was a reasonable hour, and we could still make breakfast.

Breakfast was on the terrace. I vaguely made out that our hostel was nice, and the terrace had a nice view looking out over the city. But I didn't care. More than that—I couldn't see. I ate my toast in deep numbness. “We're going to find a doctor,” I told Chris, who I'm sure was sick to death of hearing about my eye at this point. He seemed a bit irritable, either with me, or lack of sleep, or the eye thing. He was short with me, even when I told him, “My eyesight's just gone.” I was taking a miserable bite out of my toast, my eyes downcast, when I noticed that a white haze covered over the vision in my left eye. “Everything's gone blurry,” I told him again, turning to him in panic. “It's just pus,” he said. “I can see a blob of it. Here, I'll try to get it out.” And with that he took a napkin to my eye. I cringe now, thinking about it. I cringed then, not wanting anything to touch my eyeball. But whatever he thought was on my eyeball, it wasn't coming off.

Once back in the room I took a good look at my eye. Sure enough there was a blob of something there. I tried moving it around, to see if it was just gook. But it appeared to be stationary. Now I was starting to get scared. What was that thing?

We headed out into the city. Having recieved vague directions to a clinic, we made our way down the street. The heat was intense and we were sweating. The pollution seemed thick, buses and trucks belching fumes around us. I was blind to everything. Chris led me once again, but really it was the blind leading the blind. We didn't know what we were looking for. The bustle of the city was unsettling to me, and the pain in my eye was so bad I was ready to start screaming right there in the middle of the street. “Hail a taxi,” I ordered Chris. “Take me to the ER.”

The taxi driver was my savior. He understood the situation. He took one look at me and said he was taking me to the Eye Hospital. I sat back in the taxi and felt relief for the first time in days. Finally this pain was going to end.

The Hospital

Two steps inside the Tun Hussein Onn Eye Hospital, I received a diagnosis. From the receptionist of all people. “You have very serious eye infection,” she informed me.  Even from a distance she could see that. Having someone acknowledge that was a relief to me, as if I wasn't making this all up on my own. Then she said, “You have a corneal ulcer. I can see it from here.” A corneal what? I thought all along I had a bad case of conjunctivitis, or something similiar. I thought maybe some drops and some firm counsel about contact lenses was in order, but... what?

She took me to the doctor straight away. It didn't take him very long to ascertain that indeed, that cloudy thing on my eye was a corneal ulcer. Having never heard of such a thing before, I didn't realize the seriousness of it. I was still busy being impressed with such a modern and clean hospital. This was my first experience inside a foreign hospital (nothing bad had ever happened to me abroad before). I had thought foreign hospitals were something to fear and avoid at all costs. But this, well, let's just say compared to Tameside Hospital in Greater Manchester, this was a dream. Maybe it had something to do with the fact I was a Westerner. I was attended to quickly, being ushered from one room to another by polite staff. Everyone spoke English. I got the sense that I was in the most expert hands in this place. They knew a thing or two about eyes, which leads to mention the only downside to my hospital visit—the situation with my eye.

The doctor said that it was a very big ulcer (bad), though it was located just off center of my pupil (good). Still optimistic that this was just a matter of taking drops and letting the thing clear up, I refused to hear how serious my condition was. The doctor advised hospitalizing me, and I just kind of laughed it off. I'm a Westerner, I thought. They want to make some money off me by exaggerating my condition. “Just give me the drops,” I said. “We'll take care of it ourselves.”

They performed a corneal scraping on my eye, which sounds worse than it actually was. Numbing drops were about to become my new best friend. I couldn't feel a thing as he scraped my eye. They would send a sample to a lab to determine what had caused the infection. It could either be bacterial or fungal. In any case, whatever was eating away at my eye was powerful and had to be fought with antibiotics. I got loaded up with four different kinds of antibiotics—two drops, one oral, and one ointment. I was to administer the drops each hour. No problem, I thought. Now that I had antibiotics this thing would clear up in no time. The doctor wanted to see me again in two days but told me I could come back sooner if I needed to. Armed with my bag of antibiotics, I left the hospital feeling good that my condition had now been diagnosed, and now my eye could start healing.

We found a monorail station close to the hospital which conveniently took us to our stop in Chinatown. I sat like a blind person in my seat the entire ride, my head down, my eyes unfocused. Chris led me around by the hand, I was completely dependant on him. Normally when I'm out walking, I check streets for traffic before I cross them, or lights at crosswalks, or even assess foot traffic so I don't run into anyone. I could do none of those things. I kept my head down with my sunglasses on, putting all my trust in Chris not to lead me into traffic or into a brick wall.

Stopping for lunch at a booth down the street from our hostel, the noise and bustle were too much for me. I squinted throughout my meal, only keeping my food within my periphery.  I was starting to realize that this wasn't going to be an easy time, eye drops or not. The pain was very much still there; they had given me nothing for that.

The rest of the day was spent checking my watch and administering eye drops. “How long do I have to do this for?” I wondered. The schedule dominated my day. I couldn't imagine traveling like this. By the end of the day, pus had started to form, piling around my eyelashes. I took that as a good sign. Perhaps it was a sign that my eye was responding to the antibiotics. My eye was actually looking worse, but for some reason I didn't worry. I kept dabbing at my eye with tissues. In the morning, after another night of constant pain, I looked at the bedside and saw just how many tissues I had gone through. It was alarmingly a lot.

“I think my eye is better,” I told Chris, squinting at myself in the mirror. What this was based on, I'm not sure, as my eye looked like hell. My eyesight was now completely gone in my left eye. I didn't notice the extent of it until we went to breakfast and I was out in full daylight. A milky substance had completely taken over my vision. I could hold my hand directly in front of my face and not see it. I couldn't see shapes or even colors. It was as if a spider had woven a thick web over my eye in the night. Light was the only think I could see, and maybe some shadowy things in the background. I was now blind in my left eye.

Feeling that perhaps something wasn't right with this total loss of vision, I told Chris we should go back to the eye doctor. We finished our breakfast, switched rooms at the hostel (we hadn't planned on staying in KL very long, so we had to book more nights) and found our way, or I should say Chris found our way, back to the hospital via the monorail. We walked into the clinic but were told that my doctor, Dr. Azher, had left early for Friday prayers. I was willing to see another doctor. Unfortunately, that doctor turned out to be a monstrosity of a woman. After waiting an hour I was ushered into a room where a big middle-aged woman stared me down. “Yes,” she simply said, “what do you want from me?” “I have no vision in my left eye,” I told her. “Well what do you want me to do about it? You saw Dr. Azher yesterday, you must talk with Dr. Azher.” Yeah, thanks a lot you callous cow. I went back to the waiting room and had to wait another hour, then finally I was called into Dr. Azher's office.

The good doctor was evidently still praying. His assistant was on hand to examine me. I was confident that, even despite my vision loss, my condition had improved. The pain had lessened. I was able to open my eye fully now, which I hadn't been able to do in some time. So it was a bit surprising when the assistant doctor looked at me and said, “The infection has grown worse. Your ulcer is bigger in size. I'm very concerned, you can lose your eye. I advise that we admit you.” I was stunned. “For how long?” I asked. He shrugged, “It depends on what's causing the infection. If it's bacterial, maybe a week. If fungal, much longer. Maybe several weeks.” Several weeks? I didn't know what to say? What about our trip?

Chris came into the office and we discussed the situation. We were actually considering going back to Britain, as the NHS would take care of me. Something long term would completely spoil our travels. We were at a crossroads.

I agreed to being admitted. What else was I going to do? I could bloody well lose my eye. The gravity of the situation was really hitting me now. I was already blind in my eye. I could lose it all together.

Somewhat in a daze, we made the roundtrip journey to the hostel to collect my stuff, then, for the first time in my life, I got checked into a hospital room. I hadn't cried up until this point, but I was holding back tears then.

Hospitalization

Chris stayed for awhile with me. My room was actually quite nice as far as hospital rooms go. I had my own bed and my own bathroom. There was even a TV. And of course there was a chair for Chris to sit. Being an Eye Hospital, Tunn Hussein seemed slightly better than a regular hospital in that there weren't sick patients wandering the hallways, or people wringing their hands in worry, or that medicinal/poo smell that permeates most hospitals. No, this was alright. In fact, it was better than some of the places we had stayed in so far on our trip. To me, this was like the Hilton (and ironically costing about the same).

It was getting late and Chris had to leave. It was a sad parting. I didn't want to be alone that night. I found myself alone in the room, anxiously waiting to see what they were going to do to me. They had mentioned something about a shot of antibiotics into the eyeball. I'm a terrible baby when it comes to needles. Shooting something directly into my eyeball sounded about a million times worse than any regular shot I've ever had. I waited nervously for the nurse to come. Eventually she came.

I was ushered into a treatment room where they told me to lay down on a bed. There was a young female doctor I hadn't seen before. She was talking with some of the nurses in a language I couldn't understand. They kept putting drops in my eye; I was told they were numbing drops. I was incredibly nervous, but tried to soothe myself with the thought that numbing drops were miraculous things. I hadn't even felt the corneal scrape. They were taking their time. Out of the corner of my eye I finally saw the needle. I swear it was as long as a knitting needle. “Are you going to stick that in my eye?” I asked the doctor. She looked over at me knowingly. It was as if they had been trying to hide it from me up to that point. “Yes I am,” she said, and with that I tried to put on a brave face as they finished their prep. The nurses suddenly all surrounded me, one of them holding me in some kind of headlock. The doctor informed me that she was going to put my eye in clamp, and believe me, that was a freak show just in itself. I was starting to feel like the victim in a Hostel movie, my eyeball clamped with a needle hovering over it. The doctor then said something that made my blood chill. “This is going to hurt,” she said. “You cannot move your head, no matter what.” I think the fear really showed on my face because she repeated sternly, “Do not move your head.” The nurse held onto my head even tighter. And then there it was—the needle going right into my already tortured eyeball. Let's just say I felt every inch of that needle, and the injection seemed to take bloody ages. I desperately wanted to close my eyes and will myself away to another place, but I couldn't escape what was happening to me. Finally the needle was pulled out, and I felt tears, or blood, streaming down my temple. They covered my eye and left me laying there. I felt slightly traumatized.

The rest of that first night was a real downer for me. My eye, which had been sore before, was now beyond the limits of pain. It was bleeding and throbbing and just a real nasty mess. They packed it up with so many drops and gels I couldn't open it even if I wanted to. I was called into see the doctor one more time, and she pried my eye open. “Have you seen your eye yet?” she asked. “No, I haven't looked at it,” I said. She had a little smile on her face. “You should look.” I think she had appreciation for the whole freak show, and indeed I did too when I got back to my room. My eye was now blood red and squirting all kinds of fluids. I had some kind of weird fascniation with it, I couldn't stop going to the mirror and staring. But then the antibiotics started making me feel sick, and I was feeling low from the whole experience. I went to bed feeling very alone and very despondant. There was still a chance I could lose my eye. Maybe I had left it too late. Maybe the antiobiotics wouldn't work. There was a real chance I could be left permanently blind from this. Not only that, but I was told that even if the ulcer did heal, I would be left with a scar that would impair my eyesight. This was bad stuff. Any cockiness or positivity I had felt up until then disappated. It was a hard night to get through.

My Life as a Patient

I perked up in the morning. For breakfast they brought me hot chocolate, and for some reason this was comforting. The nurses came every hour to put drops in. I hate to stereotype, but they all looked the same, the nurses. Being Muslim, they all wore identical headscarves. They were all short and slightly on the plump side. Their Malay faces were round and cute and makeup-less. Some of the nurses wore little nurse’s hats ontop of their headscarves, a slightly silly look. Regardless of who came to me, they would deliver the same repeated instruction: “Look up,” squeeze in an eyedrop, “Close your eye,” and then wipe it with a swab. This was repeated over and over again by the revolving door of nurses.

I was seen by the doctor. Despite the abomination that my eye had turned into thanks to blood clotting, the doctor delivered the news that the ulcer had grown smaller. My eye was responding to the antibiotics. This was a turning point. I had been at the brink of losing or saving my eye. It now seemed apparent that it was on the saving side, though it was stressed to me that the healing time was very slow. Not having any blood vessels on my cornea, the sore wouldn't heal like a normal fleshwound on the body. It could take up to several months to fully heal. Still I was optimistic about the antibiotics working. It was a real boost. As horrific as that shot to the eyeball had been, it saved my eye.

Chris came to visit, though there wasn't much for me to do to entertain him. He sat in the chair and read for most of the day while I rested. I could read a book for a little while, but with the blurriness it became a chore. There was nothing good on TV, most of the channels were in foreign languages. Every now and again we'd find a gem like Takisha's Castle, a show in which contestants face humiliation in trying to traverse an obstacle course. Watching cute Japanese girls get knocked over by a foam arm into a vat of mud was just the kind of entertainment I needed. We could also onder movies for about $1 each, but the movies were all of Steven Seagal standard. I'm not sure how Million Dollar Baby was put into the mix, but we watched that one afternoon and made the time go by.

I had become fairly sedate. They’d given me some comfy drawstring pajamas, and I practically lived in those. I couldn't do much so I slept a lot of the time. They gave me a menu to choose my meals from, and sometimes the food was very good. My first experience with Nasi Goreng happened in that hospital room, and it was quite tasty. They brought me lots of Milo (a brand of hot chocolate) and even a snack in the afternoon. With doctor visits twice a day, with the doctor telling me all the time I was improving, my spirits were fairly high. I was having a much better stay than Chris was at the hostel, where he had moved into a dorm room.

Chris came to me later than usual on my third day there. He had gotten food poisoning, supposedly from a cafe in Chinatown. He thought it was from eating a beef noodle dish. It was obvious that he wasn't doing so well, leaving his chair several times to noisily puke in my personal bathroom. I encouraged him to try and eat something, offering some of my food (the portions were always too much for me) but he wouldn't attempt even a bite. The journey back and forth from the hospital wasn't an easy one when sick, so I appreciated Chris' effort to come see me.

Because of our situation, there were talks about ending our travels. I was still facing a long road ahead with my eye, even if I was out of danger zone. My sight was still terribly blurred. Each day I tested out my vision by holding fingers infront of my face. The day I could finally make out a letter (albeit a very big letter) on a wrapper was a good day. I felt progress was being made. My eyesight was coming back a little at a time, but I was confined to my hospital quarters. Could I travel like this? It was something to consider.

We had booked flights to Bali. We still had a little less than a month in Malaysia. It became apparant that a lot of time would be spent in the capitol, close to the Eye Hospital. If my condition had greatly improved, maybe we could take a few days trip elsewhere. We didn't know. We still didn't know what type of infection I had. If the results came back with my infection being fungal, I could be hospitalized a lot longer.

By the third day I was starting to get bored. The nurses were nice, but limited in their English. There was only one nurse that gave me a scare, one of the night nurses. She came in late, flipping on the light, not saying a single word to me. Avoiding the usual instruction to look up and then close my eye, she administered the drops one after another without me knowing what she was doing. She also cleaned my eye a bit roughly. Maybe she was having a bad day, or called in to work a shift she didn't want; I don't know what her deal was. But she scared me. For the first time I realized how helpless I was. And at night, when the hospital was eerily quiet, I realized she could come into my room without anyone knowing and stab me in the eyeball. Maybe she didn't like Westerners. Maybe she was a militant Muslim. I slept with one eye open that one night (the good eye).

My eye continued to get better. The doctor had me brought into his office on the fourth day and informed me that the lab results were in. It was a bacterial infection. He showed me the name of the bacteria; some long latin name about twenty letters long that I couldn't make heads or tails of. I just nodded and beamed. This was splendid news. The antibiotics were working and my eye was now stabilizing. He told me I could probably go home the next day. I nearly skipped back to my room.

Then Philomena started visiting. This made me really want to leave. Philomena was some kind of head nurse who was training medical students. She spoke the Queen's English and had a haughty air about her, obviously regarding herself as superior. An older lady, she was intimidating to the nurses-in-training who were now admininstering my eye drops. She'd put them down, right infront of me. She even put down their religion, her being a born-again Christain. She asked if I had found the Lord yet. Trying to hide a smile, I told her I had no religion. “Don't worry,” she said, patting my arm, “You'll find him some day.” Then she went on to tell me how meaningless life is without God, presenting her life story while the meek Muslim girls just stood there. It was very uncomfortable. Being a hostage in my bed, I really just wanted her to go. She would come back to visit me even when the nursing students weren't present. She must have thought we were the best of friends. She identified herself with the English, having grown up under British rule. Having misjudged me as someone who really gave a damn, she informed me of her high-class status and her British standards. I didn't know what I was supposed to say to her. Was I supposed to congratulate her? Thankfully Chris would show up and drive Philomena away.

After four days in the hospital, my eye had improved enough for me to be released. Actually my situation was the best-case scenario. I had stayed the minimum number of days. There had been an Australian girl before me who also had developed a corneal ulcer; she ended up staying two weeks and she had had to fly back to Australia while her friends went on to Thailand. And her ulcer had been smaller than mine. I realize how lucky I was. Sure, it was unfortunate for the infection to happen in the first place, but for me to have it, and to be in Kuala Lumpur at a place that specializes in corneal ulcers, and to have caught it before it spread outside of the cornea—I consider myself incredibly lucky. The outcome could have been much much worse.

And with that, we decided to continue on with our travels.

Kuala Lumpur, From the Sidewalk Up

I had now been in Kuala Lumpur (KL) for six days, and I still hadn't seen it. Still couldn't see much of it, for my eye was still highly sensitive. Riding the monorail I continued to keep my head down and my sunglasses on. It felt strange being outside again. There was so much noise and commotion. Our hostel was on a very busy street, full of growling buses and motorbikes. I felt vulnerable outside of my hotel room. Chris continued to lead me like a blind person. I could only keep track of the bubble of sidewalk around my feet. Every now and then I'd lift my head up, but the light would drive my eyes back down.

I told Chris I wanted out of the pollution. I could feel the germs looming around Chinatown. Chris said he'd take me somewhere modern, somewhere out of the chaos of the Chinatown streets. We boarded the monorail yet again and headed in the opposite direction. We came to KLCC (Kuala Lumpur City Centre). There I found a haven. Chris encouraged me to look up as we stood outside. Yup, there were the Petronas Towers, the twin towers of Asia, once the tallest buildings in the world. They were impressive enough, but I needed to get out of the sun. So we entered into the mall, and there I wanted to stay for the rest of our time in KL. There was every type of restaurant in the food court, even a Chili's. This food court was my home away from home, I felt safe there amongst the tables. I tried something called “cendol” for the first time—a kidney bean type ice cream that I found interesting, but Chris found repulsive.

In the courtyard outside of KLCC were the Dancing Waters. No doubt they were a replica of the Bellagio Dancing Waters in Las Vegas. Having seen both, and being a fan of both, I'd have to say that KL takes the lead as far as sychronized water goes. We watched the fountain perform to Sting's Desert Rose. The sun had gone under and the rainbow lights came switching on. It really was magnificent. Especially with the Petronas Towers sparkling overhead. For the first time in a long time, I took attention off of my eye. I was beginning to see the world again.

My eye continued to get better. The differences were very slight, yet they were perceptible. Little by little I could see letters or numbers more clearly. The extraordinary pain I had felt at the beginning of my eye episode was a distant memory. I still had discomfort and couldn't raise my head in sunlight. My eye still ran through the night. But compared to the agony I had felt before, I felt liberated. You don't really appreciate not being in pain until you've been in pain so terrible that you would do anything, and I mean anything, to make it stop. Almost two months after my infection surfaced, I still don't take this lack of pain for granted. If I ever have pain that even comes near to that level again, I'll be on the next bus, boat, scooter, chopper—you name it—to the nearest hospital.

We went to visit the doctor once again after a three-day interlude. He confirmed that my eye was now stable. He still wanted to see me in another week to continue to check its process. Chris and I were relieved at this. We thought we'd have to check in every other day or so, but the doctor was giving us a full week. We wanted to head out of KL. We wanted somewhere green and lush and pollution-free. The doctor said he couldn't see any reason why we couldn't go. So we packed our bags, and after two weeks in KL, we headed out of the city. We needed a vacation. A vacation within a vacation. The whole eye episode had been rough on both of us. It was time to get this travel thing going again.