What is the fact that sounds completely false, but is infuriatingly true? Virginia goes geographically

farther west than West Virginia. The fact that it took four times the time to go from

bronze to iron swords, than iron swords to nuclear weapons. That unlockable means both able to be unlocked and unable to be locked. My 11-year-old

pointed this out and I had nothing for her other than a blank stare and then thinking,

well, crap, good job. Sympathetic ophalmia. When you get an injury in one eye and it

loses vision, your other eye may randomly decide to go blind as well for no reason.

It can happen months or years after the original injury.

Sounds like an old wife's tale or some 19th century quacks fearmongering, but it's completely true.

Well, it's not really no reason.

Your eye is essentially insulated from your blood, as in the blood isn't ever in contact with the structures of the eye.

And hence your immune system is unfamiliar with your eye proteins.

When you get a penetrating eye injury, all of your eye proteins and structures, it's mostly retinal pigments and also some other proteins,

they get exposed to your blood and immune system.

Your immune system freaks out, assumes that these are foreign

structures, and like the good protector it is, decides to produce antibodies against these

structures. Now, antibodies are tiny and can go almost anywhere, so these antibodies go hunting

for similar foreign structures elsewhere in your body, and they find them in your other eye.

They go and attack and destroy those structures, and hence you end up with sympathetic

ophalmia.

They also go destroy those parts of your injured eye that may have been spared by the original

injury.

You then end up with bilateral, as in involving both eyes, granulomatous, made up of a bunch

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