So a few weeks back Noodal and I were doing lates during a power cut and, in a bizarre and truly random twist of fate, I leaned down to pick up a hay net and wallop! stabbed in the right eye by an errant blade. The event took out a whole weekend in a fog of pain but, being quite blokeish about these things, I resisted all entreaties from my nearest and dearest to go to the doctor, relying instead upon a giant bottle of Optrex and a shed load of Nurofen.
A few days later I was able to see and drive etc so all returned to normal. Except that I have a tendency to rub my eyes when tired and soon learned that there was a residual sensitivity in the eye which forbore me to continue this habit. So I worked with it and stopped rubbing my eye, until last Sunday night when I must have rubbed or knocked it in my sleep. It woke me up at the time and in the morning it was quite sore. Still, must carry on, I thought, up at 5:30am for the 50 mile drive to work, record breaking 6.5km at the gym (proud) and on to a series of meetings and a number of hours spent interacting with a computer before driving the 50 miles back home, by which point the eye was rather painful. Really rather painful.
By Tuesday morning it became apparent that I was in no fit state to drive or look at computer screens and the day was spent in degrees of agony, even the act of blinking an ill-advised activity. Nevertheless I hoped that some miracle would restore it to some semblance of normality by Wednesday morning, but it was not to be. I relented and called the surgery for an appointment.
I recounted events to the doctor, who frowned disapprovingly, and only brightened when he said a corneal abrasion might lead to an ulcer if left untreated. "Ahhh", I said, "uveitis?" "Ooh", he replied with a gleam in both perfectly functioning eyeballs, "are you medical?" "No", I said, "but I once had a horse prone to uveitis". The gleam faded, and he sent me off with a prescription and a note to take to A&E.
Parting rejoinder to the doctor was a quip about having to wait six hours in A&E with a throbbing eyeball. "I shouldn't think it will be that long", he said, not unkindly, "just take a book or a newspaper". I resisted the urge to scowl at him and say " a BOOK? Are you mad? Do I look like I am in a fit state to read a BOOK, you highly educated cretin, you?" For the ultimate irony is that the one time I am confined to barracks on enforced rest, I am utterly unable to read or fritter away endless hours on my laptop, in the way that I might otherwise wish to do. Arrggh.
Sid drove me up to the hospital and for a miracle we were seen straight away.The eye was examined by a nurse wielding a slit lamp (which hurt, but I was stoic) and pronounced full of dust and in need of a rinse, after the precautionary application of some anaesthetic drops. A rinse, you say? A rinse being a litre of saline being passed over the eye while I leaned over a sink. A second nurse did this and she was a very interesting character; head hunter in the city, body guard and animal nut, which was all very nice but it did not distract my body in any way from wanting to employ all necessary defensive tactics at the sight of someone coming at me with a plastic tube and trying to get at my injured orb. Bodyguard or not, she really struggled with my eyelids and eventually proclaimed them the strongest she had ever come across - what an accolade!
Back to the slit lamp and the eye was pronounced cleaner. Ah good. I really didn't want to go through all that again. Nurse said she wanted to try and curl my upper eyelid up and over a cotton bud, or some such, in the search for other abrasions or foreign bodies. What she didn't realise until after several failed attempts (ow!) was that she was dealing with the world's most powerful eyelids, and had to give it up as a bad job. She did a fluorescein stain to show the extent of the abrasion (verdict: "significant") and gave me some ointment, which as we all know is much better than drops. Chloramphenicol, my saviour. It seems there is no conclusive research as to whether or not an injured eye is better covered. In my case better not until at least the act of painless blinking could be restored, but I took to wearing Sid's wraparound shades at all times, which did help a bit.
During Thursday and Friday the eye was supersensitive to light, really bad. I had to close all the curtains and approach the rooms with no curtains with great caution. Days best descried as boring and painful, but I was at last able to tolerate an eye patch, which really did seem to help with the resting process.
And today - oh glory, with praise to all available deities - much much better! I still have to wear the shades outside but what a mercy. I celebrated by riding Q and then going into the village to do a spot of shopping and exchange eyeball-related horror stories with various shopkeepers. The girl in the deli - her uncle was hit directly in the eye by a squash ball and they had to *take the eye out* in order to treat it. Mark in the veggie shop - as a kid, a mate of his flicked a rubber band at a kid, which hit him in the corner of his eye and actually lodged between the eyeball and the socket. They had to take his eye out too to retrieve the band. Arggh. The moral of the story is that no matter how bad it is, it can always be worse. Just imagine for a moment how that would be. And then quickly do something else.
Anyway. So the eye was holding up well so having been stuck indoors doing very little for days on end, I took the dogs out for a run in the forest as a further celebration of return to normalcy. Never to be taken for granted, the ability to look around and blink and go about one's business without staccato bursts of pain issuing like a tsunami around the eyeball.
The other moral of the story of course is never to do lates during a power cut.
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