I Can See Clearly Now

It was the best of Sundays. It was the worst of Sundays.

            Let’s just start all of this by prefacing that I was still groggy from sleep – and that I was rushing.

            Let’s also conclude that, prior to further discussion, accidents happen. And accidents are, by definition, not on purpose. They are also, by their very own nature, generally a result of some act of carelessness.

            And so it came to be that, while hurriedly putting in eye drops, I instead put anti-fungus cream drops into my right eye. The result was an instantaneous pain so excruciating that it rivaled, in no particular order, my:

(1)   C-section

(2)   VBAC (Vaginal Birth After Cesarean)

(3)   Several cosmetic surgeries on various parts of my body

(4)   Several medical surgeries on other various parts of my body

(5)   Adult: Tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy; jaw surgery; quadruple wisdom-teeth extraction; braces; and last, but certainly not least…

(6)   Kidney stones

I’m pretty sure that, in those few seconds of agonizing chemical burn to my eye, in which the acid etched into my cerebellum, I spoke with Geezus. Despite his voice being drowned by my resounding screams of pain, echoing in my cranium, I am fairly certain that I heard him say, with a bit of what I detected as patronizing derision, “I’m not ready for you yet. I have a lot more work to do with you.”

And boy howdy does he ever. And he can start with teaching me not to put toenail fungicide on my cosmetics counter, right next to similar-shaped bottles of eye drops.

Aside from the unbearable level of pain clearly not relative to the smallness of the size of any eyeball, there are a lot of great parts about this day, the least of which was not losing my eyesight.

I’m also proud to report that, even though it has been a long, long time since my first two years of college when I took a single, basic lifesaving course, I still remained level-headed enough to remember to flush the eye while simultaneously trying to explain to my boyfriend – with my head under a sink faucet – that no, my hair was not somehow caught in the drain and yes, I needed his help.

Now here’s where he might start pointing out that things like this – including the possibility of me getting my hair caught in a sink drain – is not all that unlikely or unusual in our household. But I’m writing this, so we’re not talking about that.

My guy managed to dial the eye doctor while I stood in the shower, fully clothed, forcing myself to open my eyes in the face of the showerhead, and allowing the stream of water to pellet my eyeballs.

On speaker phone, I heard the eye doctor say, in all caps, “OH NO!” so loudly that I heard her through the din of the gushing water. Listen caregivers, caretakers, people of medicine, that’s never ok to say in response to someone’s medical issue. When I heard her, clear as day, say, “She has a chemical burn to the eye,” that’s when my imagination took hold and carried me straight to wearing dark sunglasses at night and using, for all my years to come, a white cane with a red tip.

I got re-dressed as quickly as I could and managed to pour approximately a gallon of eye drops (the real stuff this time) into the injured eye as my boyfriend drove me to the doctor.

The same doctor, whose comments only a short while earlier had me believing that I was going to be needing to learn Braille, all of the sudden kicked into legit, full-on doctor mode. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll take good care of you.” As she went through testing the pressure of both eyes, checking my vision, applying a dye to the acid eyeball and checking for dead tissue, her office receptionist, a sweet, young girl whom I’ll call Melissa, asked me to repeat my story.

“Really?” she asked, “You put toenail anti-fungal cream drops in your eye?”

When I showed her the bottle, she took a picture, and I thought, for a moment, “Oh gawd, this is going to be one of those stories they share at the office Christmas party, where everybody, in their semi-inebriated states laughs and begs the doctor and staff to tell the story again and again and again. “Here, I’ll show you the bottle she used,” and they’d pull out the phone photo to use as a visual aid (pun intended).

But that was not the case. You see, it turns out that – in talking about the toenail medicine – I spoke so highly about the product that Melissa wanted to recommend it to her mom, who apparently also has a problem with her toenails.

Later that day, as I left the office with my vision intact and only a bruised ego, I couldn’t bear one parting shot:

As I walked out the door, I glanced over my shoulder and called out, “Remind your mom that the drops go on her toes and not her eyes.”

And so it was, with the echoes of their laughter in the background, the worst of Sundays became the best.