So I was sitting at my desk, talking on a training call when suddenly something got under my left contact. I don't know what it was - a fleck of mascara, an eyelash - whatever it was, it hurt. My eye instantly started to water and I could barely keep it open. I was in pain. I hurried off of the call and then stood up in my cube and shouted over the wall, "Does anyone have any saline solution?! Or eyedrops?!" Michelle said, "I do!" and handed me a bottle of Visine Allergy. Without thinking about whether or not these drops were contact safe, I dropped some in my eye. The whatever-it-was didn't get dislodged, so I stumbled my way into the bathroom, eye all closed and watery and quickly washed my hands and took out my left contact. I held the contact on my left index finger while I put the drops in my eye again to get rid of the eye intruder. I then rinsed off my contact with the Visine and popped it back in my eye. My eye was a little burn-y, but I'd used Visine Allergy before and I remembered it being burn-y then. I gave the bottle back to Michelle, thanked her, and returned to my desk where I started a note in our system to document my last call.
A few minutes later, Tony (the president of our company) came walking by and we started to talk about something or other. Suddenly, he just stopped mid sentence and said, "Is there something really wrong with your eye?" I told him that I'd had something in it before and asked him if it was really red. He said, "No... it's not red... it's... it's... well, you better just look at it." I turned around and picked up the mirror on my desk and looked at my eye. I swear to God, it looked like this:
I freaked out. "OH MY GOD!!" Joe walked in to say something to Tony and when I looked up from the mirror, they were both looking at me. "I've never seen a pupil that big before!" Tony said. I stammered out how I just had something in my eye blah blah blah contact blah blah blah and Joe said that I'd better take my contacts out. I hurried off to the bathroom trying to hold in my laughter. I got in the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror again and started to laugh. Hysterically. Michelle came in to check on me and I think she was shocked to see me laughing. I couldn't help it - my eyes looked so stupid!
After I removed my contacts, I got back to my desk and was examined by a bunch of my coworkers. The general concensus was that my eyes were f-ed up and that I should probably go to the ER or something. I was a little panicky - I had no idea why my one pupil would be dilated, so I agreed. I called Alex, who was pretty confused at my hysterical call about my eyes being screwed up and asked him to come pick me up. Then I went into the other room and knocked on Larry's office door. I opened the door, interupting his meeting with Eric and practically shouted, "Um, my eye is totally FUCKED up and I think I'm going to go home or to the ER or something!" They both looked at me for a second, and then looked at my eyes and agreed that maybe I should get that checked out.
I walked outside to wait for Alex and snapped a picture of my eyes with my phone:
My pupils weren't as huge because I was out in daylight, but you can see that my left pupil was substantially bigger than my right. Alex tried to calm me down when he got there. "It's OK," he said, "you're not going to go blind, you didn't have a stroke. You must have gotten something in your eye that irritated it. You'll be fine." I didn't quite believe him. Every other time that my eye was irritated, it just got red. Now it was totally fucked up. My pupil was HUGE and it wasn't going back to normal. He drove me to the ER and we sat in the parking lot for a second. Alex continued to try the calm approach: "We should just go home and wash your eye out with your saline solution and rest. Your eye will go back to normal." I was completely hysterical - I'd spent the entire car ride over alternating between crying and laughing like a madwoman. "Just tell me what to do!" I wailed. He took me home while I babbled about going blind or having fucked up eyes forever. "No one will ever take me seriously again! How could you, when you're staring at my one crazy eye?!?!" I don't quite know how Alex put up with me.
We got home and Alex marched me upstairs and right into the bathroom. He told me to lay down on the floor and put my head on the edge of the tub. He grabbed my saline solution and started to douse my eye with it. "Keep blinking" he instructed. I laughed. And laughed and laughed. I couldn't stop laughing. I apparently react to stress very oddly - when I'm panicked, I laugh. "Stop laughing," he said, "you're not the Joker." That set me off even more - that's exactly what I sounded like: the Joker.
Finally, he stopped rinsing my eye and told me to go lay down. He layed next to me in bed and tried to calm me down and told me that I should sleep and if my eye wasn't better by 6, he'd take me to the ER if I wanted. I finally stopped laughing and fell asleep. My internal alarm clock woke me up right at 6. I sat up in bed and looked at my watch, then looked at Alex and said, "Is my eye still fucked up?!" "Yes," he admitted. I said that I thought we better go. I figured that I better get my eye checked out. I was really worried that my eye would never go back to normal... that I'd finally get it checked and they say, "If you'd only gotten here earlier! We could have done something... Now you're stuck like this forever."
We got to the ER and I got triaged. The nurse in triage asked why I wanted to be seen tonight. I looked her right in the eyes and said, "Well, my left pupil is huge and that sort of bothers me." She looked at my eyes and got a weird look on her face for a second, composed herself and began the H&P. We waited for a bit in the waiting area. I wondered why they didn't get vinyl seat covers for that area, since I was sure that the chair I was sitting on had been peed on before. Ew. Some woman who came in after me grabbed a sheet of newspaper and spread it out on her chair before she sat down. "Interesting approach," I thought, "though she looks pretty filthy to begin with." God, I'm a bitch.
I got called in by a nurse named Marty who showed me to a small private room. She asked again for my story and took the bottle of eyedrops that I'd remembered to bring along. She told me to make myself comfortable and the doctor would be in in a little bit. Alex and I watched Seinfeld while we waited. He kept telling me that they were going to tell me what he already told me. Whatever. Know it all. I just wanted to be sure that my eye was OK and that it wasn't going to be f-ed up forever.
The PA finally came in and immediately told me to lay down. "I'm going to put some drops in your eye - this is going to burn," he said. Yep, those drops burned. He then put some dye in my eye and checked it out with a UV light to make sure that I had no corneal abrasions. I didn't. He then said that my eye was likely irritated by the drops and that it would probably go back to normal by the morning. I couldn't even look over at Alex because I knew that he was revelling in his rightness. "If it's not better by tomorrow," the PA said, "I'd call an Opthomologist." He then took the drops and said that he was going to look up the medications in it to see if anything could have caused the dilation. When he walked out the door, I looked over at Alex. I swear, it looked like there was a spot light shining on him. It was probably his beaming grin. "Ok," I said, "you were right." The PA returned, saying that the antihistimine in the eyedrops could have caused the dilation.
We left the hospital a little over two hours after we got there. Alex was all, "I told you so..." Whatever. My eye was all f-ed up for the rest of the night, but this morning it was a lot better. In daylight, my pupils are the same size, but in darker lighting, my left pupil still gets a little bigger than my right one. Alex says that my body is probably still trying to work out the irritation and that it'll go back to normal soon. I hope so. I don't want to have even slightly crazy eyes for the rest of my life...
I still can't control my giggles when I think about how stupid my eyes looked yesterday! I crack up so bad when I think about how I was talking to Tony, totally unaware that my one eye looked insane. That is so funny!! I mean, check out those pictures!! How hysterical is that?! (Well, anyway, it's really funny now that my eye is pretty much back to normal...)
