Monday 1 April 2013

Eye-ing up the Odds

Last Tuesday I got something in my eye. Given that they are demolishing a rather large hospital not two hundred yards from my house, I'm not surprised. My front door is usually covered in a fine layer of cement dust, and god knows what we are ingesting. I might as well smoke a pack a day at the moment. Unfortunately, this thing, this veritable boulder in my eye was still there at the end of play on Wednesday. I had a reprieve on Thursday but it was back with a vengeance on Friday morning.

The weird thing about things in your eye is that not only are they incredibly painful, but they send you stark-staring mad. Vigorous rubbing of the eye actually achieves nothing, but you think that somehow it will magically eject the foreign object instead of what it really does - scratch the living daylights out of your cornea. Add to this the fact that I seem to be allergic to my own tears, causing angry redness on the skin around the eye, and you have a picture of raging, raving loveliness who practically had to be restrained from clawing her own eye out.

To be honest, when I finally cracked on Friday morning, I wasn't quite sure where to go. Phoning my doctor and expecting to get in within a decent time frame (30 minutes tops) was out of the question, yet the emergency room wasn't quite merited either. It didn't help that I was inundated with well-meaning Eyeball Nightmare Stories.

Like my friend who'd waited four days before having an eye problem seen to last December and ended up having four retinal surgeries, only just avoiding loss of sight. Or The Ex-Queenager's friend whose thing in the eye was misdiagnosed, was actually a cyst which, by the time it was diagnosed, caused significant loss of vision and a future corneal replacement. Why tempt the fates? Especially when you have my luck.

I eventually phoned the local Pearl Vision, where we all have our eyes tested. Could they help? Why yes, and we can see you immediately. Turns out whatever had been in my eye had since flown the coop, but left a series of scratches on my cornea and a burgeoning infection. Gulp.

Upside of the story is that 48 hours on an anti-biotic eye drop have worked a miracle. OK, not a miracle, but my eye is fine. (Lord knows what would have happened in ye olden, pre-anti-biotic days eh?)

Now, back to work and less of this lying-around-with-hand-clamped-over-eye nonsense.


6 comments:

  1. Sounds awful. I am glad the antibiotic did the trick. I never would have thought to go to Pearle Vision for that but now I know.

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  2. Yeah. I have a friend who's a neurological ophthalmologist (eye surgeon) and she always goes to those places to get her eyes checked 'cause they're all qualified optometrists and more.

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  3. You did the right thing and thank goodness for a good optometrist. They are worth their weight in gold. I know I trust mine a lot.

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  4. Irene - yes. Half of me was saying "Oh it;ll be fine", but then well, what's the point in risking your sight. I nearly died when she said it was infected. Wouldn't have been good to leave it any longer.

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  5. Thank goodness you went in when you did! Glad it's on the mend, I'm the world's worst at procrastinating on that kind of thing - thinking it will surely work itself out. *Making mental note to self - quite putting off calling the doctor, the optometrist, etc.*

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