The hairy, metallic eyeball of death…

Today, I replaced the muffler on my beloved old Jeep.  I finished up and came inside for a well deserved beer.  I cleaned up, got myself a pint and plopped down on the couch to soak up the air conditioning and pleasant company of my little darlin’.

My eye started to burn.  This didn’t bother me too much because there is a nasty little virus running around the house that isn’t the cat.  My baby has been sick and I’ve had trouble with my sinuses.  I chalked it up to an effect of the sinus issues I’ve been dealing with.  So, I rubbed away at my right eye and watched a little telly.

My eye just kept burning and it felt like there was something in there.  So, I leaped from my perch and waddled to the loo.  I leaned into the mirror and pulled down my lower eyelid and gave a good hard look.  To my surprise, staring right back at me, almost bulls eye on my cornea was a bright, shiny metal shard.

My pulse raced… ‘See, I don’t mind being shot, stabbed, mauled by a pack of rabid otters or having my spleen removed through my left nostril.  But, sweet Jesus, please don’t let there be anything wrong with my eyes or my finger nails.  I guess it’s just a little phobia I have.  As a medic, I saw all sorts of eye injuries and they never bothered me.  When I saw this metal in my eye, my face got hot and flashes of cold went up and down my legs.

I called out to my little lady and bless her heart, even as sick as she was, she came running.  I asked her to verify what I had seen, hoping that I had become some sort of mineral schizophrenic and the object I had just seen was a figment of my newly formed disorder.  But alas, it was really there.

I still have all kinds of medical stuff laying around the house from my days as a medic.  So, I asked her to assist me in flushing this eye with normal saline.  I spiked the 250ml bag with an IV administration kit, attached an 18 gauge catheter and asked her to use it as a squirt gun into my eye as I squeezed the bag.  No dice.  The steel girder clung to my eye like a dingle berry on a bears arse.

Off to the ER we go.  I got the standard treatment.  The very same treatment I myself have administered over the years to soldiers with foreign objects in their eyes.  The doctor numbed my eye and looked at it through a magnifying scope and found the downed 747 and its crash site complete with debris on my cornea.

There was only one solution.  The very same solution that medieval doctors had performed.  The same procedure used in the far east as a form of torture.  A procedure so unpleasant that it makes a male chlamydia test seem pleasurable.  He had to take a needle and use it as a scoop to remove the sunken Titanic from my eye.

Pallor washed over my face as my legs turned to over cooked pasta.  I could feel myself slipping to that “white place” between the here and now and “flashback land”.  The needle inched closer to my eye and time slowed to a crawl.  I could hear my heart beating in slow motion.  Louder and louder it beat until it was almost deafening.

As the needle made contact with my eye the contents of my stomach stood on the platform waiting for the northbound train.  The vision in my eye was being manipulated by the needle with every pass the doctor made.  Almost as if he were adjusting the focus of my eye manually.  Out of the corner of my good eye, I could see my darlin’ standing there in the room.  She was the most beautiful color green I had ever seen with an expression somewhere between confusion and shear terror on her face.

In the past, I have used the expression “I would rather stick a needle in my eye than to do that”.  No, no I would not thank you very much.  It’s painfully apparent that I have to find a new catch phrase to utter when I want to get out of doing something.

The doctor removed the gantry for the Apollo 11 spacecraft from my eye with about three million swipes with his deadly instrument and unsteady hand. “I’m just gonna take one more look” he said. So, once again my chin was in the scope for him to view my eyes.  You know, when a doctor looks at something and makes a discerning sigh, one tends to feel what it must be like to exsanguinate at the hands of a vampire.

“I see a little rust ring on your cornea where the metal was” he said with an evil smile.  “I want to take a few more swipes at your eye to see if I can remove it” he said as he maniacally laughed.  “What an evil prick” I thought.  Oh sod it, just get on with it so I can go have a beer!  So once again, the razor sharp javelin made contact with the delicately soft tissue of my fragile eye.

The doctor finished up after an attempt on my part to pass out.  I guess adrenalin got the best of me and I damn near keeled over.  So, he gave me a prescription and my discharge paperwork. I grabbed my lasses arm and we ran for the safety of the parking lot.  Little did I know, the worst wasn’t over.  Once the numbing agent wore off the shredded flesh, my wounded eye (where the excavation had taken place) felt like the streets of Pompeii after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

And, the doctor had yet one more trick up his sleeve.  Once I got home, after we stopped at the druggists, I took one of the pain killers.  Now my guts feel as terrible as my eye.  I guess the only saving grace is that I’m higher than a kite in a hurricane.  Oh well, gonna pass out now…