Learning to blink

A visit to my eye doc today revealed something that both annoys and fascinates me immensely, so thought I'd share.

Over the last few weeks (especially but perhaps not only) after my recent surgery, I'm finding that my mornings are ok but my vision tends to blur and the eye starts hurting by the evening. Right after doing anything invasive to a graft, all those kinds of things become concern areas (on a constant lookout for early telltale signs of graft rejection), so brought this up at the doctor's today. He checked for rejection, lack of healing, wounds reopening blah blah blah and everything was normal. But my complaints persisted.

After being flummoxed for a while, he started asking questions about what helps the vision get back to normal when this happens and which time of the day it happens... until he finally hit upon the problem: I'm not blinking.

Here's how it goes: during transplants, the nerve endings always get cut, and while other healing is relatively quick, nerves take a long time to reconnect, if they ever do (3 1/2 years after my skin graft on the arm, I still can't feel heat or cold in that area... somehow I hadn't made the connection that the same thing could happen to the eye). So, my eye doesn't register the slight burning sensation that occurs when you haven't blinked in a while.It isnt something you think about in a normal eye: the eye registers dryness and you blink as a reflex... about every 5 seconds, apparently. My eye doesn't register the dryness and so I don't blink until the eye gets really dry and hurts a lot and messes up my vision.

Why do I find that fascinating? Well, think about it. No medication can help this particular problem, and none is needed either. All I need to do is blink. Blink every 5 seconds, and this part of my problem should be fine. Sounds so astonishingly simple to fix. But is so incredibly difficult. How on earth can anyone remind themselves to blink every five seconds of every day? It's one of those moments when I simply marvel at the human body. But also find myself stuck in what I can only describe as a cruel riddle: how do you learn to do something that you do unconsciously, when your unconscious mind doesn't register the need to do it but your conscious mind knows it to be vitally important?

I'll give out a prize for the most creative solution!