Relative Something

For most of 49 years I enjoyed the gift of clear and focused eyesight. When the muscles and related aspects of my vision reached their limit of function and began to fade, it was all new to me. My natural inclination was to complain, but there isn’t much sympathy to be had from those who have been wearing corrective lenses for most of their lives. I’m now trying to suck it up and deal with it silently.

Back in the fall of 1985 I had a different kind of scare with one of my eyes.

It was a Friday night when I initially became aware of an itchiness in my eye that caused me to rub it. Saturday morning Cyndie & I decide to go out to breakfast. Throughout the morning I was catching myself repeatedly rubbing that eye, but I was mostly oblivious to the obviousness of the indications. It didn’t feel like there was something in there. It felt itchy, like irritation from an allergy.

As we slid into the opposite sides of a booth, Cyndie immediately commented that my eye was all red.

‘Duh’, I thought to myself, and I reacted, “I know,” even though I didn’t, because I hadn’t even had sense to look for myself. “I’ve been itching it all morning.”

When we got home I finally did look in a mirror, and lo and behold, there was a dark speck, plain as day! After a couple of faint-hearted attempts to wipe it away myself, I enlisted the skills of my wife. She is a contact wearer. She knows how to actually touch an eye.

First, she wisely suggested we flush it out with saline solution. It didn’t move a bit. Suspicious? Yes. When it failed her every attempt, we decided to make a trip to the doctor. Of course it was Saturday, and our options were limited to the emergency room.

Upon further review… the diagnosis: metal sliver; rusting.

Metal sliver!?!! How did that git in thar? …Oh oh, I bet I know. It was the previous Wednesday –3 days before! I was scraping the old veneer top off of an antique dresser using a chisel (need I say, without eye protection?). I felt something hit my eye, but I assumed it was a fragment of WOOD. Blinked a couple of times and seemed none the worse for the wear. Kept on working and never thought about it again, even as it began to itch days later. Seems the itching wasn’t the sliver, it was the rusting. Who’d a thunk it?

It is pretty fascinating to me that I didn’t feel any sensation from the sliver itself. When something hit my eye, I just blinked, and then, everything seemed fine. I try not to think about what was happening while I was rubbing. Didn’t Mom teach us not to rub our eyes?

The doctor warned me about what was going to happen next. A drop in my eye to numb it, and then she would extract the sliver. Realize this though, I couldn’t just look away until she is done. I was looking right at this pair of tweezers comin’ at me! AUAAUUUUUGHH!

The drops numb the eye all right. However, that doesn’t eliminate sensations from enough of the surrounding area to stop me from noticing that somebody is pulling on my eye. I can’t adequately describe to you how entirely bizarre this whole process was. Just to make it even more eerie, the numbing drops turned everything a funky shade of yellow.

It only took a few tries before she got a hold of it and proudly presented a very recognizable metal sliver for our approval. I was instructed to wear an eye patch for a day or two and could expect complete healing with no residual damage. Unfortunately, I had tickets to a football game that evening and was made to struggle for trustworthy depth perception, using one eye from up on the second deck.

All in all, a prudent dose of humility served up there, I tell ya. You should see the collection of protective eyewear that I’ve amassed since that incident.

Unfortunately, now I need to get some protective lenses that include magnification so I can actually see what it is I am doing.