THE SECOND EYE TEST

Last night, I peered into the mirror while cleaning my teeth. It was late, I was tired. The toothbrush buzzed and grated while my face did its usual contorting and the tap did its usual burble. I wasn't even bright enough to do my hummed rendition of Nessun Dorma in the same key as the buzz. I just looked at myself.

My eyes went funny again, swirling in and out, trying to resolve the image of me trying to resolve the image of me. I stared, glumly.

I've never been sure what colour my eyes are. I think they're sort of brown-green; I used to say they were 'muddy puddles' but they're a bit too misty for that, more like boring marbles, or perhaps dried-out sunflower leaves. Definitely not blue, anyway, and very ordinary.

Anyway, while lost in the weird recursive loop of staring into my own uninteresting eyes, I suddenly realised something...

One pupil is bigger than the other.

I know. They are supposed to dilate in low-light, and yes, of course they can change size. But aren't they supposed to change together? The more I gazed at myself looking at myself looking at a mirror image of me with one eye wider than the other, the weirder it looked.

I pulled the light off, then back on again. My pupils wobbled back into size, once again with the left one wider than the right.

Could this explain why I've been struggling to see properly? Is one eye not functioning like the other? Am I going to have to wear an eye patch to correct it? Is this just an aperture F-number problem, while these two different pinholes try to resolve the same image in parallax?

There's one easy test, I suppose, before I get my hospital appointment: figuring out whether dramatic light-level changes make the symptoms noticeably worse. I could run indoors and outdoors a few times. It would look weird, but maybe slightly less weird than sitting here, trying to work with an eye-patch. That theory might also explain why it's hard to fix an image in the mornings when I wake up.

No news on the appointment by the way. If you're the praying type like I am, send one up for me - if only to help me not look like a desktop pirate.