The other day, I was thinking that I hadn’t done anything worth writing about for a while. Then I poked myself in the eye with a stick.
I had been breaking branches off a small bush in the backyard when somehow a twig splintered off and flew into my eye. If you’d like to know what it feels like to have a twig fly into your eye, dig your fingernail into your eyeball and leave it there for the rest of the day.
I ran inside and found a mirror, expecting to see a giant stick coming out of my eye. All I found was a little piece of bark, even though I could feel a splinter or something behind my eyeball. Deserae tried to help by flushing the splinter out with saline, and I wish I could include a photo gallery of all the contortions we tried to get the solution into my eye. It was basically 20 minutes of this:
“Hold still.”
“I am holding still.”
“Keep your eye open.”
“I’m not trying to close it!”
“That’s funny, because you keep closing it!”
“It does that on its own when someone’s SQUIRTING SALINE DIRECTLY INTO IT!”
Three minutes of wrangling into a new position.
“YOU’RE PULLING OUT ALL OF MY EYELASHES!!!!”
By the time we finished, the bathroom was covered with saline.
I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening willing my eye to feel better while trying not to think about the tiny splinter I could feel lodged inside. Around 8 p.m., my eye started gooping and feeling much worse. At 9, I finally considered the emergency room. Two reasons it took that long:
- I had never been to the emergency room in my life. I am an alarmingly uncoordinated individual, so I consider 28 years of no ER visits pretty impressive. You don’t break up a streak like that willy nilly.
- A $250 co-pay. $250!! Thanks, OBAMA.
When the prospect of never seeing again finally outweighed the $250 co-pay, I visited the hospital website. They have a new emergency room equipped with the same call-ahead seating technology Outback Steakhouse uses, so you can put in a reservation without waiting four hours next to a gunshot victim. My online reservation said to arrive at 11, so at 10:55, me, Deserae and my beating red eye showed up to the emergency room.
When I entered, I glanced around the room to play a quick round of What’s Wrong With Everyone. Out of the dozen or so people, I couldn’t really get a good read on anyone except for one guy with a loud, gurgly cough. He was about to die.
The front desk lady asked me what was wrong, where I lived, etc., before closing with the Hospital’s Hardest Question.
“Are you in pain and if so, can you rate it on a scale from one to ten?”
I broke into a sweat and opted to sidestep the question.
“Yes.”
She looked up impatiently. “Rate it on a scale from one to ten.”
“Uhhhhh (I want to appear tough, and the pain’s not really that bad compared to the death rattle guy), ummmmmmmm (But if I go too low, I might never get called in), like, ya know, 5 or 6?”
She wrote something down (I assumed it said ‘this guy’s fine’), slapped on my first hospital bracelet since I left in a baby blanket, then took me back to a room to get my vitals taken.
I got the special “Fall Risk” sticker on my bracelet. Had no idea my clumsiness was that obvious.
A few minutes later, she reappeared. “You checked in early, so we’ll take you back now. We have to go through this door, because if I take you through the front, everyone in the waiting room will kill us.”
Thank you, Outback Steakhouse!!
Deserae and I got escorted into the room like a VIPs and just hung out for a while. We had a very nice time – it was kind of like an expensive little date. (Except for the wheezing right outside our door occasionally reminding us that we had cut in front of a man at death’s door.)
The physician assistant eventually came in and started asking questions about my eye. I could tell Deserae wanted to let the guy know she is a nurse and had already assessed the situation, but she didn’t want to sound like a butt.
“So where exactly does it hurt?”
“Uh, like the red part. By my nose.”
“The medial part of the eye,” Deserae chimed in.
The physician assistant’s eyes lit up. “Are you in the medical profession?”
“I’m a nurse!”
The two talked shop for a couple minutes while the medial part of my eye continued to hurt.
The next step was putting dye in my eye to detect a scratch. I was really looking forward to this part of the evening, as I was hoping the dye would make my eye glow or at least turn it neon green. Before the guy could insert the dye, however, he had to squirt something else into my eye. I didn’t catch what it was, but he was pretty liberal with it, and it ended up dripping down my face.
He left to get the dye and Deserae asked how my eye felt.
“OK, but it’s getting puffy. Really puffy actually. Is that bad?!”
“He squirted numbing stuff in it.”
“Oh. That’s probably why half my face is puffy too.”
I really wanted to poke my eye to see how it would feel, but Deserae would have none of it. A couple seconds later, I would get my wish as the physician assistant came back with a stick that had a cotton swab on one end and a sharp point on the other. It looked like something a bad guy on 24 would pull out after saying, “We have ways of making you talk.”
He proceeded to poke my eye repeatedly with both ends. I don’t know how much it would have hurt without the numbing stuff, but I can’t imagine it would have felt much different. It actually kind of felt like he was digging holes into my eyeball, which seemed to be the reason I was there in the first place.
“Hm, I don’t see anything, but we’ll see if the dye turns anything up.”
When he poured the liquid into my eye, I discovered that “dye” was doctor code for “acid.” It didn’t make my eye glow or turn it green, but it sure did burn through the numbing liquid fast. He turned off the lights and looked into my eye with a magnifying glass for a few minutes before declaring, “Nope, I don’t see anything at all. Not even a scratch.”
He said it in a way that seemed to indicate he was a little disappointed in me for wasting both his time and the time of those who don’t have much longer on earth.
Waiting room guy piped up behind the closed door again. “Cough. Hack. Wheeeeeeeeeeeze.”
Maybe I should have been happy, but if I spend $250 and break a 28-year streak, I hope for a little more than, “You’re probably just a wuss.”
I tried to raise the possibility that there may be a splinter buried deep inside my eye, but he dismissed it.
“A lot of times, a scratch can feel like something in your eye.”
Well, aren’t you smart, physician ASSISTANT.
Unfortunately, the doctor examined my eye a few minutes later and agreed. My eye may have a teeny, tiny scratch, but it was fine. The only thing left was a tetanus shot.
A few minutes later, the nurse came in with the biggest needle I had ever seen.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “This won’t hurt.”
I was worried.
As she was getting the shot ready, I took off my hoodie. She glanced over and said, “Actually, let me see if I can get a smaller needle.”
When she left, I turned to Deserae. “Wow, that was huge. Why do you think she decided to go smaller?”
“Well, the tetanus shot is one that goes into your muscle, soooooo…”
Oh.
The nurse came back with the pediatric needle, and sure enough, it didn’t hurt a bit! She gave me some drops for my eyes and sent us on our way.
As we walked back through the waiting room an hour after we had arrived, I made sure to stare at the ground. Still, I could feel a dozen pair of angry eyes following my every step. Actually, I think it was eleven. R.I.P., Wheezing Guy. Blame Outback Steakhouse.
LIFE LESSON #12
Always check in early at the emergency room. Unless you don’t want to be a horrible person.