the eyeball incident

This is the story of the eyeball incident. I hope this never happens to any of you.

The other day, I was walking down the street and some dust blew into my eyes. I blinked and everything was fine...until a few hours later. I was taking a shower, and I absent mindedly rubbed by eye. I thought I'd rubbed my contact out, but it was still there. My eye felt a little weird, but I didn't think much of it.

When I walked into the living room, Eli stopped me. "Your eye is really red." I went back to the bathroom and looked closely at my eye. I took out my contacts and fiddled with my eyelid. What happened next made the bile rise in my throat and the floor drop out from under me. Because, you see, it appeared that the bottom part of my eyeball had turned into an egg yolk.

I had a few thoughts: 1) That I was going to go blind, 2) That my eyeball was falling out, and 3) that my eyeball had detached somehow. Either way, I had to get it checked out. You would too if your eyeball looked like egg yolk.

Eli, being the good boyfriend that he is, pretended that everything was fine, and kept reassuring me that it was no big deal. Every fifteen minutes or so he'd peer at my eye and say, "Oh, it looks much better." He kept a poker face on the entire night and held my hand the whole time, even acting as my spokesperson when I got too anxious to form sentences in Portuguese. He is a keeper.

First, we headed to the public clinic less than five minutes from our house. Though I've heard horror stories about public hospitals, this one was brand, spanking new and completely pristine, with new furniture and a mural on the wall. I gave my information to two people and in literally less than 10 minutes, they called my name. We went into a room with a desk and two chairs, face to face with a beautiful doctor who couldn't have been a day older than me. She peered at my eye and said, "You better go to an ophthalmologist."

So off we went in search of another hospital. We went to the fancy schmancy hospital on our street, where a snobby but helpful secretary informed us no, they did not have an ophthalmologist but directed us to two places that did. We stopped for directions about half a dozen times before we finally found--you'll never believe this--a 24 hour eye clinic about 20 minutes on foot from our house. There was one other patient there, and I only had to wait about 15 minutes. In the meantime, I gave my information to the nurse.

"Do you have medical insurance?"

"No. I mean yes. But not the kind you accept. So, I guess no."

"No insurance, nothing at all?"

"No. Can I just pay the fee?"

She sighed tragically. "You can pay, but it will be...(dramatic pause) SIXTY REAIS." She looked at me with pity in her eyes, as if she expected us to get up and storm out.

"Um, sixty will be FINE. Sign me up." So I gave her sixty reais in cash (she said they don't accept credit cards "at night"...go figure) and off I went. I got a really nice lady doctor who immediately put me at ease. Her explanation, however, did not so much:

"Your eyeball is like a soccer ball tightly wrapped in a plastic bag. Sometimes, that bag can come loose a little bit."

I will never think of my eyeballs the same way again.

So as she was taking my information, a ginormous cockroach appeared out of nowhere, and she screamed and hopped away. "I'm TERRIFIED of cockroaches! Can you kill it please?" Eli obliged, and I headed over to the eye machine so the doctor could look in my eye. "I'm still shaking!" she kept saying. "But your eye looks fine."

She gave me a prescription for eye drops and I thanked her profusely, and we were on our way. We stopped at a 24 hour pharmacy that was all boarded up except for a bullet-proof window and a metal  drawer, which I dropped the prescription slip in. "Nope, we don't have that," the man told us through the intercom. Incredibly, sometime before 1am, we found a wide-open pharmacy right near our house, where I bought the eye drops. When I got home, my eye no longer resembled an egg yolk, though there was a curious pocket-like bulge instead. The next day when I woke up, the area below my eye was lined in bright yellow, like someone had taken a highlighter to my face.

On the way home, Eli sighed deeply. "I was SO worried," he said. "I'm relieved you're ok." I am, too.

Comments

[Vivian]

Oh my! Great story! I love the image of the doctor hopping away from the cockaroach (though I'm sure I would to!), and the receptionist's dramatic pause!
"Your eyeball is like a soccer ball tightly wrapped in a plastic bag. Sometimes, that bag can come loose a little bit."
I've never heard that before!

I'm glad your eye is well!

[mandy]

As you say.... oy vey! haha that sounds like something that could easily happen in the DR, especially the cockroach incident. Eli sounds so precious, too... I wish I had a cute little caretaker! Bring him to NY! (after I wrote that sentence I realized how incredibly stupid it was. as if you aren't already trying haha).