The Tale of The Eye Patch

...don't be excited. It isn't a good one. The coolest part of the whole ordeal was the eye patch, and most people have already seen that...

The last week of school before finals is typically the craziest. Any student can tell you that. It had finally taken its toll on my roommate, and she just had to get out of the house. So she comes in to our room, where I'm reading innocently on my bed, and says, "What are your plans right now?"

"I'm going to go running, then study some more, then babysit later tonight. How come?"

"I'm losing my mind with all this studying. Steph and I were going to go up to the mountains and pick some flowers if..."

"Yes, I want to go with you."

"GREAT!"

So we gear up (and by gear up I mean gear up. Ashley knows knives like its nobody's business) and head to the mountains. Which here means Rock Canyon Park.

Ashley loves flowers. And she knows where to find them. She felt like she was crazy for having desire to do this activity, or at least for telling us about it, but we were all tired of being at home. What wouldn't be fun right then? And it really was fun. We just went from place to place trying to determine if the flowers we wanted to pick were actually part of someone's property or if we were trespassing. At one of these points I got something in my eye, a gust of wind, some dirt probably, and rubbed it out. And then two minutes later was dumping a water bottle on that eye with my head out the window. And then twenty minutes later at home I was rinsing this same eye desperately trying to get the burning to stop. Goodness, it was excruciating. My eye was bright red and swollen, and after an hour or two and no improvement, we decided to go to the doctor. A comical affair as I was mostly blind and my roommates were trying to get numbers out of my phone to rearrange my babysitting plans, get someone else to pick up my friend from the airport, and retrieve insurance information. On a phone that seems to only respond to my touch. When they did finally get ahold of my mom's phone, it was my punk brother who answered, thinking it was me, and tried to immediately hang up on my roommate.

My wonderful roommate took me to urgent care, and the nurse (as well as my mom) wondered what on earth I'd been doing when I got whatever it was in my eye. Ashley and I, in unison, responded, "picking flowers." "Ah..." Really, what do you say to that? After he walked out, I said, "He either thinks we're lying and super dumb if that's all we can come up with, or..." and Ashley finished,  "he thinks we're dumb because that's what we were actually doing."

We were still laughing when the doctor walked in.

The doctor was incredibly pleasant given the situation. I expected him to be not as amiable for my apparent stupidity or because we were coming in after hours. I just never know with them. But he was very friendly, and considerately announced everything before he did it. He numbed my eye (which when he announced, Ashley and I were both thinking, "So you can do WHAT?") and then dyed it orange. I wish we had the presence of mind to take pictures of this part. The orange dye was to make the surface of my eye visible under a black light. So after dying my eyeball, he turned of the lights and shined the black light while I attempted to move my eye around. What a weird feeling. To still have perfect vision but limited capacity to move your eyeball.

The verdict was that while I'd managed to dislodge whatever was in my eye, it had done some hefty damage to my eyelid, which was causing the intense pain and sensation that something was still inside of it. The solution? Eye neosporin and a patch to keep it shut so it could heal overnight. He said it should heal overnight, but Ashley asked, "You mean she doesn't have to wear this to class tomorrow?" and the doctor, without hesitation, "Actually, it would be best if she could wear this for the next three days."

Pleasant man. We bid him goodnight, Ashley took a picture in the lobby to update my mother, and she had it on facebook within the minute.

And I went home and fell asleep.