This past weekend Michael and began surveying the path we would use to build a dock behind our house. I bought this great new laser measuring device to make measurements easy. It's a really cool tool and Michael and I were have a great time using it until disaster struck.
Out in the marsh the salt grass comes all the way up to eye level. The tops of the grass are very pointy, probably for the purpose of keeping critters like me out of the marsh. While I was out walking around in my waders one of the pointy tips skewed under my eyeglasses and skewred me dead in the left eye.
After I got poked, I was pretty worried because I heard about a guy who had to have surgery following a similar incident with marsh grass. After a few minutes my vision cleared and the pain was not too bad so I shrugged it off and kept working on the dock layout with Michael.
About an hour later the pain in my left eye started getting pretty bad so we headed into the house to get a look at the damage. I couldn't see any problems but Michael and Stephanie could see scratches around my pupil. Strangely, the pain was progressing in waves almost to the point where I was wincing in pain. At this point, we sent Michael home and went to the urgent care doctor to get an assessment of the damage.
We waited 30 minutes in the waiting room of the urgent care doctor. We were one of two people in the room so it makes me wonder why the wait was so long. It's almost like they make you wait just to suffer a little more. Maybe to teach you to never come back. Eventually we saw the doctor and he put a chemical in my eye that made it go completely numb. I went from writhing pain to completely normal in the span of 15 seconds. It was pretty amazing. He looked closely at my eye and couldn't see any damage so he put a dye in my eye and then inspected with a flourescent light. I wish I got a picture of me with dye in my eye. It might have been an interestingly creepy shot! ...something I could use around Halloween. He then in inspected me with a fluorescent light to see the scratches that my wife and brother had already discovered. "Oh you've got a pretty good scratch in your cornea".
The doctor told us that totally immobilizing the eye was the key to having this heal quickly. He said the cornea can almost completely heal itself in 24 hours if immobile. Since the motion of your two eyes are connected this basically means covering both the injured and non injured eyes.
Apparently my injury was not too bad because the doctor only sent me away with a pain killer. Normally if you have anything half way worrisome they will at least prescribe antibiotics. This injury, unfortunately was not at the antibiotic level.
So when we got home Stephanie blindfolded me and I became the blind man. I had a little over 24 hours before work on Monday and the goal was to be ready for work to keep bringing home the bacon. Being blindfolded was an interesting experience because I had to relearn to do many of the things that you normally take for granted. For example, eating food with no sight is a pretty big challenge. You have to concisously remember where food is on the plate and you have to remember where the remaining food is after you eaten some. I actually of enjoyed being blind because there was sort of a new challenge to doing things. For example: I tryed to light my pipe and it wasn't easy. Luckily I had Stephanie nearby to coach me and to ensure nothing important caught blaze. Of course, after the pipe was lit she headed back into the house to avoid the smoke.
There was one thing that I didn't enjoy about being blind: Peeing while sitting down. Not at all manly.
On Sunday night we took off the blindfold and amazingly my eye was as good as new. No more pain.
I love it when a plan comes together.
