So, yeah, ummm... hydrocodone will be kicking in soon, nice to have those leftovers from an unrelated problem I had late last year.
Saturday I was in a mist of grinder grit and steel dust as I converted large quantities of sheet steel into sharp buoyant satellites, most of which were absorbed into the ventilation system at ACC. Most. Not all.
A little bit of eye irritation occurred during my two hours of grinding, but I though little of it. Dust in the eyes, big deal, been there done that, familiar territory. The annoyance passed and I went on with my day.
Sunday evening, though, my eye got a bit more irritated. Annoyingly so, but also easily dismissed as tiredness and a residual scratch from the previous day. During our shopping trip Sunday night I picked up some red-eye eye-drops.
As it turns out, red-eye soothing eye drops do very little good when you have a golf-ball-sized chunk of grit/steel/whatever embedded in your eye.
I managed to get to sleep Sunday night, but my eye was kicking up a fuss, and throughout today's fun at work (Monday, my favorite) it get more and more irritated. As did the rest of me. So I called my eye doctor, Lester Kitchen (a great guy), and made an appointment for 4:45 today.
I soldiered through the day with no joy and lots of squinting. People averted their gaze, or stared horrified as I wandered through my tasks, my red rimmed eye aflood in tears.
Leaving work, I discover that bright light makes my eye hurt even more, as the pupil contracts. Ouch.
The always friendly Dr. Kitchen set me up in his machine, made my eye fluorescent, and then proceeded to use bright lights and various filters to highlight exactly what was up in my optic center. That is when he took the picture of the golf ball previous mentioned; a sizable chunk embedded in the lower-medial octant midway between the pupil and sclera.
It would have to go. Imagine my excitment, for a moment. Sure, my eye hurt. But now I would have the doctor doing who-knows-what to it to remove this vile intruder.
That "who-knows-what" began with a soothing (well, stinging, but it self-correctly quickly) application of numbing eye drops. Two or three times, in fact; the Dr. was quite good about the pain management.
Once I was good and painless, he propped my head back in his infernal machine, had me fixate on a distant point, and then he started golfing in my eyeball with what he called his sand wedge. To no effect, the particle was too deep (into the second layer, it seems).
Next up was a device he says he's had little chance to use, just a few times in recent memory; it looked roughly like an 8-gauge syringe needle mounted in a noise-hair trimmer, and made roughly the same sound (once he replaced the dying battery).
It took a few minutes, and quite a few jabs with the spinning needle of DOOM, before he managed to dig down to the particle and send it packing. Or flying. Or whatever it did.
It is now gone, with nothing more than a sizeable crater (I assume) to mark its passing.
I am now the proud wearer of a contact-lens "bandage" which I get to irrigate regularly with antibiotics and, between those doses, lubricating eye drops, as my poor abused cornea heals.
On the bright side, he said I had the steadiest eye he's worked on in a long time... and the third he has worked on today!
It's a busy season for eye cruds, apparently.
Posted by Edwin at May 5, 2008 06:19 PM