Apologies for this effort post being a couple pages late, I just heard about the auto immune disease on the stream today. I've scrolled through the past couple pages, and I think a lot of you are gravely underestimating how fucked up his condition is. Let me shed a little light.
The condition of Elliot's eyes is known as iritis, an inflammation of the iris (might not be technically correct depending on what part of the eye is being attacked, but it results in the same symptoms regardless). This is not the auto immune disorder, but rather a condition caused by the disorder attacking his eyes. Many things can causes iritis, but even though the causes vary, the iritis manifests the same.
Even though it might just look like surface irritation, his eyeballs are swelling internally. This comes in waves with autoimmune disorders, he can be going about life just fine and then suddenly without warning wake up with his eyes bugling out of their sockets in particularly acute attacks. As you can imagine, this is extraordinarily painful in and of itself, but that's far from the worst of it. You know how your pupil changes size with light level? You have a ring of muscles in your eye that contract to control this adjustment.
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I'm sure you all at some point have had an injury or infection that caused swelling and know full well that those areas become very sensitive to touch/movement. Well then you can piece together that the pupil adjusting with iritis is excruciatingly painful. However the pain is not comparable to any other sort of bodily pain, internal eye pain is very unique. Elliot comparing it to having glass in your eyes is pretty accurate, although I've heard some say it's like someone grinding glass into your eye as hard as they can with the base of their palm. Another vivid description I've heard: It's as though your pupil is made of razor blades and your can feel it slicing through your eye as it changes size. It varies with the severity of the attack, but he is in no way exaggerating how bad it is. In fact, despite how much of an attention whore he is, he's underselling how awful it can be. Not being able to go outside/stare at a screen is an average flare up, bad ones can be so incredibly painful that the ambient light in your house through closed blinds and closed eyes even can cause debilitating pain. In the worst attacks there is literally no escape except to lock yourself in a 100% light deprived room, but even then you will still feel pain from your eyes being swollen. These severe attacks can also cause immediate damage to the eye from the severe swelling, in some cases blindness. So he might not even have to wait a decade to go blind, it's possible he could just wake up one day in immense pain and be completely blind in one eye.
I cannot understate how painful this condition is. On top of the excruciating pain, it can leave you effectively blind and helpless. You can't even leave a darkened room. Furthermore, in the case of autoimmune disorders the attacks come randomly and can last a couple days to several months. It is a brutal condition that on top of the suffering it causes, completely warps your life around it.
Don't just take my word for it, go check out some support groups and reddits for this condition. They are more depressing than support groups for parents of kids with cancer. You will see a lot of late teen/early 20s (when the disease usually starts showing symptoms) talking about killing themselves, they have no hope their life will be worth living. They are completely downtrodden broken people, and I can't fault them for it. They don't have social lives, they don't have the freedom to go outside, they cannot support themselves, they can't hold even a shitty job, hell they can't even work from the room they're stuck in. It's one of the worst conditions a person can be afflicted with.
The worst part of it is, this is just how the autoimmune disorder attacks the eyes. The disease can cause evolve seemingly randomly attacking organs, hair, skin, nervous system, muscles, pretty much anything. There's no cure either, much like with cancer it's just your body freaking out and killing itself. The best they can do is abate the symptoms and postpone the destruction of your body.
What's the point of this long gay post? Elliot has to suffer from two forms of dilation, his stink ditch and his eyes. God is real and has sick sense of humor. Cope, seethe, dilate, and dilate again.
