20 years ago I was injured in one eye. Without an operation it would have left me going slowly blind. The operation was invented maybe 20 years earlier.
Both my eyes had a cataract at a quite early age. Artificial lenses where invented AFAIK 50 years ago. The new lenses even correct my shortsightedness and astigmatism!
So if I had lived only 50 years earlier I would be blind on one eye and quite possibly without a lense or at least seeing really foggy on the other. Now I am sitting here with - 0.5/-1 and otherwise great eye sight.
There are no words how grateful I am for the wonders of modern eye medicine.
I’m so glad you have your vision!
The first successful organ transplant was in 1954.
Transplants weren’t often super successful until the development of Cyclosporine in 1982.
Similar thing happened to my dad. He was slowly going blind from cataracts, like he couldn’t even make out the dinner table in front of him. He just wasn’t mentioning it until it became untenable.
Then we found out there’s a free surgery to fix it, and now suddenly he’s got clear 20/20 vision at almost 80! He’s got better vision than I do lol
I think similarly whenever my airways casually close up.
Waking up when the weather changes:
You’re nostrils do that as you sleep to keep the one closest to the bed/ground closed. Since people roll from side to side over the course of a night your nostrils swap which one’s closed
Everyone’s talking blocked sinuses but I took your comment to mean asthma.
While every other cave person is running down a mammoth my asthmatic ass would be dying because of pollen or dust.
Mine is also triggered by animal dander so the mammoth could probably kill me by literally just standing next to me.
I assumed sleep apnea. CPAP users of today are the past’s “dang he died mysteriously in his sleep, oh well!”
As a CPAP user; when I don’t use it I relate to ‘dying in my sleep’ way too much.
imagine being an absolute beta and not mouthbreathing
Personally, I tend to use my mouth to inhale other things.
spoiler
It’s - it’s dick. This is a sex joke.
Look up how to clear / flush / drain your sinuses. I do it from time to time and it works wonder for multiple days
That won’t help with asthma sadly :(
I don’t know what you already do and what your insurance would cover but here’s a list of things that helped me tremendously:
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I have two different inhalers. One for attacks and one prophylactic. Since I use the second one daily I haven’t had an attack in 10+ years.
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Have an asthma diary. Measure your breath a few times a week and take notes. After a while you will recognize patterns days ahead when the chances for an attack might be higher. Medicate accordingly! I up the dosage for the prophylactic inhaler slightly when I see changes (e.g. during allergy season).
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Breath out! That one sounds stupid, I know. Paraxoically the major problem with asthma often is breathing out, not in. So there are breathing exercises where you learn to focus on breathing out to make way for easier breathing in. It can be as simple as counting to 5 while breathing in and counting to 8 while breathing out with a 2 seconds break before again breathing in. Adjust the numbers for you. It calms your breathing and can even help with an attack (though I would still use an inhaler then).
I also have my lungs screened every two years. Ever since I follow the above list my measurements get better over time even though I am slowly past the “it will heal by itself” age.
Where I am from all the above steps are covered by insurance. I know for example in the US inhalers can be obscenely expensive so step 1 might be a problem. But steps 2+3 are low cost and are still very beneficial. So I hope you can find something in the list that eases your burden.
Insurance isn’t something I need to worry about. I have a prophylactic that I use in preparation for if I’m gonna stay somewhere with a dog etc.
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I apparently threw my glasses across the room in my sleep last night. Spent a solid 5 minutes going full on Velma mode looking for them.
Do you wear your glasses in bed??
No, I frankly don’t have the slightest clue how I did it.
That makes this so much funnier
How else are you gonna see in your dream?
Funnily enough, taking my glasses off in a dream and still being able to see is how I’ve realized I was I a dream a couple times. Unfortunately I immediately get way too excited at the prospect and immediately wake up every time haha
Sleepwalking is correlated with stress levels. I’ve sleepwalked a few times in my life; some I half-remember, but most not at all, I only know if I find out from someone else like family/friends/partners.
When I was a teenager, I had a wall scroll that hung above the head of my bed. One morning, I found it piled on the floor next to my bed. It could have been one of my family, but they all denied it and there’s no motivation anyway. I had to conclude that I did it in my sleep, but it’s stuck with me because I’ve always found it extremely disturbing that I’m up and about while I’m completely (or nearly completely) unconscious. I’ve lived in a few skyscrapers with windows and balcony doors that opened more than enough for me to jump, and the idea that I’ll wake up halfway down scares the everfucking bejeezus out of me.
Ha, thats why I keep an old pair in the nightstand.
u can use your phone’s cam
I make use of that trick a lot, unfortunately it wasn’t a ton of help this time.
Natural selection hasn’t really applied to humans for thousands of years. We beat nature when we created civilizations. Which is partly why some of these less than ideal genetic traits go unchecked now in the population.
Evolution and natural selection never stops, we’ve only changed what the selective pressures are.
True. I was thinking of the selective pressures of nature, but there are absolutely still self imposed selective forces acting on our species.
And even those self-imposed selective forces are ever-changing and vary quite wildly from context to context across the globe and across the socioeconomic spectrum. Modern human evolution is really fascinating.
Fascinating but terrifying to think that natural selection is probably now pushing humans to be good little office drones rather than survivors
That’s only true if people that work in offices reproduce at a higher rate than the general population, and I’m not entirely sure that’s the case. If anything, societal trends have shown that in more developed countries where office work would be more common people are having fewer kids and populations are starting to decline.
I know how you mean it, but I would still consider civilisation part of nature. Like an anthill is part of nature even if it was “invented” by ants, etc
It doesn’t have to do with civilisation, but with group compassion. In fact, civilizations tend to care less if somebody starves to death on the streets because their eyes are not performing well enough to earn money…
That’s really not true at all though. Look up “Food Pantries in my area” and see how many places offer food in your area. The blind man would qualify for lifetime disability checks. Food stamps are a thing, charities and churches do this kind of work as well. My city has an emergency rent program and there are, of course, homeless shelters and soup kitchens as well. It’s really that society’s mechanism for meeting the needs of the hungry are part voluntary (charity) and part automatic with entitlements (not a bad word!) and sometimes people fall through the cracks.
This is why getting people connected to resources is such a big deal.
I can’t imagine having to live with my natural sight 24/7.
I definitely would not be driving. Probably not walking much either, might not see the bus coming.
its not like they had cars to drive before glasses were a thing
I was more imagining the current world, but corrective lenses were never invented.
on the bright side we would probably have much better public transit
On the other hand, without the invention of lenses we wouldn’t have most of our science and technology. No microscope, no telescope, no microchips, no precision engineering. So many things today are possible only because we could enhance our shitty vision with lenses
If you had lived at an earlier point, there’s a good chance your eyesight would have been better. Not just because of natural selection for genes or whatever. The modern spread of nearsightedness is primarily attributed to greater time spent indoors, looking at things close to you like books, and particularly during childhood. It is largely nurture instead of nature.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220927-can-you-prevent-short-sightedness-in-kids
Remember, your only job as far as natural selection is concerned is to have offspring and have them survive long enough to repeat the cycle. Old people with bad eyesight just have to be able to keep the kids and grandkids alive.
Bad eyesight could have a positive effect on generating offspring because you can’t tell how ugly your partner is. Or that about 30% of the time you aren’t having sex with your partner but someone else with poor eyesight instead.
You’d be having sex with a sneaky fucker
Don’t even need to be old. Don’t need to be able to see that good to know the red blotch that smells like the good berries is probably the good berries, and the antelopeish splotch might be a good thing to poke with your pointy stick of choice.
you know whats even weirder? Some dude somewhere realized that lenses were a thing, and realized that your eyes were also just a glorified lense. And that theoretically you could just put a lense over a lense to fix the bad lensing of the lense. And it fucking worked.
Natural selection my ass.
Legend has it that it started with an old drunk man that decided to hold beer bottles to his eyes.
i dont know about that one to be honest.
Would be pretty funny though.
The “traditional” story (the one that “seems most likely” because we don’t really know) is that some kids were playing with discarded warped glass at a glassmaker’s shop and ended up with a magnifying glass or rudimentary telescope. Enter the simultaneous invention of the telescope in multiple places (very likely it wasn’t any one person in particular), Galileo starts using it for scientific stuff, now they’re making lenses on purpose. Old nearsighted lensemaker looks through it, maybe some charts or a book on the table, all of a sudden they can see well. Attach to frame. Glasses.
this seems much more likely, i like this one.
Some species members care for each other. Humans obviously (some anyways), even lions I think have been known to provide food when another has broken teeth or something.
Apes feed and care for their elderly. When the old ape decides it’s time, it will go off alone into the jungle to die
I don’t need it to be night to realise that. I have -13 on both eyes, near-sightedness (not sure about the correct terminology in English). I see clearly for about one centimetre right by the tip of my nose, everything closer or further than that is a blurry and fuzzy mess. To use my phone without glasses I have to press it against my nose and can only see about half of the screen width clearly.
I think they just meant night time is when people remove glasses, so that’s when you notice the difference 😎
Oof I’m circa -10/-11 and that’s rough enough. I’d say an inch vision not a centimeter for me.
Do you have an option for eye surgery?
I did it with -8/9 R/L and they sit at -0.5/1 diopter now nine years post LASIK. Best decision I’ve ever made.
I’ve seen videos of eye surgery, no thank you I’m happy with my glasses and contact lenses
I’ve seen videos too. LASIK with double laser is the least intrusive. Pop a Xanax and fifteen minutes later it’s over.
I was enjoying the light show a lot. Very interesting experience and would do it again in a heartbeat if needed.
The other issue is I’m pretty sure it’s hugely expensive isn’t it?
It’s also not risk free. There are tons of YouTube videos talking about people’s bad experiences with it including possible side effects, some of which are a dealbreaker for me like a mouse cursor having starbursts. No thank you, I will take my glasses over that. I’d never opt for eye surgery unless medically necessary.
I remember maybe a decade or more ago some enterprising gent made a glasses design with some kind of resin in the lens, so the wearer could adjust the lens thickness to fit their needs. Nobody would back his invention so he created a non-profit to fund these glasses for the developing world. I’d love to know what happened to it because its still something I care about supporting.
Wow, that is a very cool concept. I, too, would like to back this.
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I like to tell my Republican father we’d both be classified legally blind and on the welfare he hates so much if optometry wasn’t around. Helps put it in perspective for him how some people just “lose” the life lotto and need help to live in the same world as able-bodied folks.
Yeah, I always get a warning message from zenni when I order glasses. It thinks my script is wrong cause it’s such a weird one.
I know I’m half blind! Don’t make me feel bad about it too!
That and a bunch of reasons
but mostly the bunch of reasons
As someone with bad sight, all my other senses are tingling. So, while blind people might’ve been unable to hunt, they would have made great night guards, which is a boon for social groups wary of nocturnal predators.
Not that this would be the only thing I would be selected out for…
