More than Meets the Eye

Don’t you hate when you get something stuck in your eye? Not like a stick, but more like an eyelash. Honestly, I can’t imagine having something like a stick, when a thin little hair is painful enough. Part of why it bothers me so much is because I am a hard contact wearer.

Most people who wear contacts are lucky enough to wear the comfortable soft kind, the ones you can easily dispose of or replace. They are moist and comfortable, or so I hear. Me? Well, after years of being one of those people, I just couldn’t see anymore. My options were to wear glasses all the time and have mildly impaired vision or to go gas permeable and learn to live with the pain. My eye doctor at the time described wearing hard lenses as having a bottle cap stuck under your eyelid, only not that comfortable.

Honestly, hard contact lenses aren’t that painful. After a week or so of adjusting, I hardly noticed them anymore, unless my eyes were dry or I had something in my eye. The problem is, my eyes are always dry, and when they aren’t, I have something in them. I spend a portion of every day blinking like I have a tic or the creepiest wink ever. No one has ever said my eye thing is disturbing, but I have a feeling that is out of courtesy or just plain awkwardness.

What I am trying to say is, I always have something in my eye. It's not just an occasional irritant; it is part of my daily life. If I’m at the beach, it’s sand. If I am in the woods, it’s whatever the wind blew under my eyelid. And if I’m at home, it’s a hair. An eyelash, an eyebrow hair, it doesn’t matter. One time I even had a long head hair wrapped around my eye.

Think about that for a minute….it was wrapped around my eye. Do you have one of those boiled egg slicers? If so, you remember what it looks like when you stick a hard boiled egg in it and lower the slicer thingy, and right before it cuts through the egg, it has a bulgy appearance, the tension forming a meniscus on the egg's surface before it slices clean. That’s what the head hair around my eye looked like, at least to my other eye that was looking at it.

When I woke up this morning, my left eye was irritated. I walked to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. This examination was pre contact insertion, so I had my glasses on. I can see with my glasses, but not well. It might be legal to drive in them, but I wouldn’t swear to it. Anyway, when I looked in the mirror, lo and behold, my left eye was all swollen and puffy, and not just my normal morning eye bag puffiness. This was allergic reaction swollen, the kind that would make strangers recoil, the kind that would make children point and scream, the kind that gets you whisked into an exam room at the ophthalmologist’s office.

I took my glasses off and pressed my face up against the mirror so I could see what was going on in my eye. I tugged a little on my lower lid and saw the end of a cat hair hanging out on my eye. Bingo, I thought. No wonder it looks like I’m having an allergy attack, because I am.

Yes, I am allergic to cats. I like them; they are furry and cute and strangely affectionate and clingy, and they bury their own poo. But my body treats them like the enemy if we get too close. Cat licks on my neck produce red welts like I’ve been whupped with a leather strop. An unfortunate and absolutely accidental cat scratch results in a raised weal that rivals the Continental Divide. And a hair in the eye, well, it looks like I need a battered woman’s shelter.

I pulled down on my eyelid to try to extract the offending cat hair from my eye socket, but it turns out it wasn’t a cat hair. It was a clump of cat hair, a hair ball, if you will. I didn’t go to sleep with that fur wad in my eye, but I sure woke up with it. How does one get something like that in an eye during a fitful night of sleep? Did I sleep-groom my kitties? Did the cat plant it during my altered state of consciousness?

You know that magicians' trick where they pull a handkerchief out of their pocket and it just keeps coming out, one after another, all knotted together like one unending colorful scarf? That’s what my cat hair wad was, a never-ending third rate magic trick. I just kept pulling out hairs, all knotted together. It was about a kitten's worth of hair, not unlike the tumbleweeds of cat fur that roll across my hardwood floors.

After sleeping with the offending clump of hair under my lid for a solid six to seven hours, thank you Jesus for the night’s sleep, my eye was swollen to the size of a giant squid’s. Have you seen one of those? They’re fucking huge.

And yes, I crammed a contact on top of it.

 

Open Wide

I went to the doctor today for my annual checkup, and no, it was not the dentist or the gynecologist. It was an eye appointment, which I dread more than those other two combined. Having significant myopia, I am always slightly embarrassed by how poorly I see, as if had I only tried harder growing up, I could have aced my vision tests, been the vision valedictorian. But unfortunately, eye exams don’t work that way.

To make matters worse, a few years ago, while still nursing my youngest daughter, I experienced such rapid deterioration of my distance vision due to hormonal changes and some condition that I am unable to spell. I found myself weekly at the ophthalmologist’s, funding his new SUV and lake property while trying every brand of contacts available on the US market with short lived, if any, success. Finally, my exasperated eye doctor fired me, since he couldn’t fix me, sending me instead to his colleague who specializes in problem eyeballs with bad contact issues. He ruled out LASIK as an option due to the double whammy of thin corneas and large pupils. I ruled out wearing glasses because of my vanity, my long eyelashes, and my intense desire to see peripherally. We compromised on hard lenses, not the most comfortable solution, but definitely the one with the best results. So now when I go to the eye doctor for what is a routine appointment, I sweat it, fearful that my unspellable condition is back, which will leave me sightless, wandering the streets with a dented tin cup full of pencils and a sign around my neck.

Today was no exception to my irrational fear of eye appointments but what made it worse was that I was due for dilation. Dilation can be fun, but not when it’s your eyeballs. No one I know likes to have their pupils dilated, and every two years when it is my turn, I am hopeful that some new technology has been invented that makes those evil eye drops obsolete. Alas, this was not the year. I sat in that Rube Goldberg of an exam chair and peered at the eye chart behind my black plastic spoon, trying desperately to not memorize the 20/20 letter line before switching to the next eye. I then read a close up eye chart, again relieved that I had dodged the reading glasses bullet for another year, thank you Jesus.

Dr. S came in next to work his magic, the portion of the eye exam that makes me both nervous and amused. I popped out my contacts and he moved the large apparatus in front of my face, blurring the eye chart. He then rapidly flipped lenses back and forth, a succession of “One or two? One or two?” that happened too fast to discern a difference. This part of the eye exam reminded me of a cartoon show on Comedy Central  from years ago, Dr. Katz. Dr. Katz was a squiggly animated therapist to comedians who would sit on his couch and tell jokes about their lives. One time, a comedienne said she had to break up with an optometrist she was dating because every time they were in bed together, he would ask her “Is it better like this or like this? Like this or like this?” I cannot go to the eye doctor without thinking about that episode, but Dr. S doesn’t appear to share my sense of humor, so I kept that story to myself.

After all that fun, and no significant changes in my prescription, it was time for the bad part. Dr. S left the room so his assistant could have the pleasure of administering stinging eye drops.
She handed me a tissue, telling me, “Blot, don’t rub.”
I did as told and discovered bright splotches on my Kleenex. “They’re yellow!”
“You should see what it does to your boogers,” she laughed.
“Aren’t they already that color?”
“I guess,” she said, “But it makes for a cool party trick.”
“I don’t think I want to go to any of your parties,” I told her as she gave me another round of eye drops, this time clear ones.
“Well, maybe one for second graders. Second graders would appreciate a booger trick.”
I raised my fist in solidarity. “My peeps!”

She parked me in the waiting room and I read my book until I could no longer focus. A good friend of mine, after earlier hearing of my scheduled appointment, had said to me that eye dilation is worse than torture at Guatanamo, which at the time I felt was an exaggeration. But as I sat there, unable to do anything but stare plaintively at the other patients, I had to agree with him. Pupil dilation is not just a mild inconvenience or a slight discomfort. It is a mindfuck for half a day, impairing your sense of reality to the point of near madness.

As I lost my ability to see, I began to rely on my other senses. Eavesdropping on the optical department was my only entertainment option since smelling wasn’t something I really wanted to do, and the idea of sitting and doing nothing for forty-five minutes would make me insane. I have an irrational fear of sleeping in public, so a nap was never an option. But after listening to an elderly couple argue over their remote and where they parked the car, I was ready to confess to anything just to make it stop.

Finally, the assistant called my name and gently guided me back to a room. Dr. S entered and acquainted himself with my optic nerves. I was given a clean bill of eye. No obvious tumors, no significant floaters, no high pressure build up. I stumbled to check out, declining the attractive free wraparound sunglasses in favor of wearing my own sunglasses over my regular glasses. I discovered once outside and in my car that the effect made me look more unattractive and unstable than the freebies, but I wasn’t about to walk back in the office to grab a pair. I drove home, more impaired than after a couple of cosmopolitans, wondering if I did get stopped and ticketed, could I bill the doctor’s office.

So now I am home, my pupils more dilated than at a Grateful Dead concert, waiting for the sun to dim. It is almost time to get my girls from school, and I am hoping that over the next thirty minutes, the effects of these eye drops will wear off, after over 5 hours, and I can again multitask while driving instead of clenching the steering wheel tightly and breaking at every imaginary obstacle. Why is it that preventive care can make you feel as unhealthy as an actual disease? All I know is, being debilitated for a day is the last thing a hypochondriac needs.