Lights in the tunnel

 So I went to my eye doc for a checkup. After several rounds of eye drops and peeks through various machines, he gave me a verdict For Now:

-- He's seeing very slow but steady improvement in the graft adhesion, and would like to give it more time to improve before scheduling a re-do surgery. This means that I will keep doing what I'm doing -- eye drops every two hours while I'm awake and covering with an eye shield to ease light strain -- until my next checkup on December 30. At that time, he'll decide whether to proceed with the surgery in early January, or push the date out another couple of weeks.

-- If I feel brave, I can try riding a bike around my neighborhood. Obviously, distabnce and field of vision still remain issues, but if I stick to residential streets and short distances I should be okay.

-- I can resume wrenching on bikes at home, though seeing things up close will require that I use reading glasses.

I should be thrilled.

I'm not.

In fact, I feel super low-energy and kind of down. I know some of it is physical/seasonal -- I live with Seasonal Affective Disorder, IBS, and Crohn's and those things can sometimes be really pesky -- and some of it is just that it is cold and very wet outside and I haven't felt like being out in the muck.

Am I getting "soft"? Am I just lazy?
Or is it hard to get motivated when I have nowhere else to go during a pandemic?
Likely a bit of all of the above.

So tomorrow, I am making a promise to myself to bundle up, go out to the shed and kick on the tiny space heater, and spend some time working on bike projects that have sat too long.
I'm not yet sure how comfortable I feel trying to ride again, but we'll see.

Tonight, I'll bask in the Chanukah lights and my Sweetie's embrace.

If you're celebrating the return of the light this month in any form, enjoy the lights and the warmth and hope they bring. And let's all hang in there so we can see what the future holds for us as the days lengthen again.