The sheer pain one feels when there’s something under a contact lens is enough to make a grown man crawl.
Today was not a good day.
In my utter panic to get out the door on time so as not to miss the city bus that would spare me being late for yet another grammar lab, I quickly opened by contact lens case, took out the right lens, scanned it quickly to make sure there was nothing big on it, then took my standard position right in front of the mirror. I pried open my eye (using that lovely two-finger method that sometimes results in a poked cornea) and popped that sucker in as quickly as I could. And then…
“Oh. My. GOD! AAAAAAAA!”
There is an unbelievable amount of agony involved in having multiple little somethings stuck between your eye and something which, every single time you blink, gets pushed into it–embedding, quite literally, of course, fiery little needles even deeper into your eyeball.
Never, ever again. Ever. For the first half hour of having those… beasts under my lens, I couldn’t even open my eyelid. Couldn’t even open it. It felt like someone was grating sandpaper on my eye… times about… whatever the pain index for having three teeth pulled without anaesthetic is.
As a result of both eyes then wanting to close (try keeping one eye closed and the other open–yeah, that’s right, it doesn’t work), I walked around my apartment like a blind, bumbling fool. On the plus side, I have a newly-found respect for the sightless. On the negative side, my shins hate me for having tripped over the coffee table three times.
Does anyone know how hard it is to dial a phone number without being able to see the numbers? You basically have to rely on your implicit memory and hope that you’ll be able to pull it off. I reached the optometrist on the first try, thank God; but it took me about four tries to get a hold of my mother’s actual number so I could tell her there was no way in Hell I was going to go, basically blind, to the bus depot and take a bus. Marianna, Ken and Lois Silpa, and whoever the person was who hung up on me, I’m sorry. Well, not to the person who hung up on me–thanks for not tell me what your number was, you stupid asshole.
ANYWAY, getting back to me. I finally got to the wonderful, beautiful, spic-and-span optometrist’s office and the doctor (I want to be this man’s mistress, I’m so thankful) checked it out a bit. How he even managed to check what was going on in there in the two-second intervals during which my eye would open slightly and then screw itself tightly shut because of this absolute anguish is a mystery to me, but he did it and then held my eye open with his fingers and popped that stupid fucker right out.
He checked me again, gave me some drops, said some stuff about possible viruses, and sent me on my way–to my seminar for Education.
As though the embarassment of being too stupid to get my own contact lens out of my eye wasn’t horrible enough, the lens of my eye itself is pretty damaged and the whole time, it was tearing (well… streaming) and being all red and swollen, and causing me to have a horrible case of the sniffles.
Want to know what the seminar was about? Signs of Stress and How to Deal with It. Supposedly, crying for no apparent reason is a serious physical and emotional sign of having too much stress.
TWO HUNDRED PEOPLE COULD HEAR ME SNIFFLING. FOR NO APPARENT REASON. And whoever was on my right side (at least half of them), was seeing crying.
The whole time, everybody kept looking at me like I was some crazy whackjob that the seminar presenter had probably hired to see if they could recognize the signs of stress. Some stupid hippy-like girl to my left actually asked me if I was feeling stressed and was starting to crack because of it, since, you know, the right side of my face was crying and all. Oh yes, I’m definitely feeling stressed. But only half-stress, obviously, since ONLY HALF OF MY FACE HAS TEARS. I mean, how stupid can you be? I was looking right at you when you started talking to me, and I could definitely see you staring at the bloody red mess that was of arteries in my right eye. Use your brain, stupid–it’s clearly an irritated eye. It’s like everyone thinks that because they’ve been to some seminar they’re all qualified to be psychologists now and can just throw common sense out the window.
Stupid, stupid girl. I wouldn’t have been stressed at all had she not spoken to me, I think. Sure, the pain of the contact hurt like monkeys were digging for ants in my eye, but I have surprisingly seen a lot of worse incidents with contacts and wasn’t insanely worried about it. Having that girl sit there and give me smarter-thus-holier-than-thou pity looks was the real mood ruiner of the day today. Better lay off the speed, honey. I don’t think we want hard drug addicts for teachers.
I have another appointment with the optometrist tomorrow, just so he can check to make sure my eye’s not gotten infected and that the cornea is regenerating at its usual rate (it regenerates itself every fourty-eight hours, just so you contact wearers know). I’ll let everybody know how that goes.
For now, my eye freaking burns. Even with these drops, I can still feel heat just… emanating from it. Ugh. Talk about taming the shrew just a bit.