Mamarati

So, I just got back from out of town… road trip with the family. Good times. Until… Suddenly my eye starts hurting.

Really hurting.

I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t open my eyes because it hurt. I couldn’t close my eyes because it hurt. No matter what I did, it hurt.

We started the long drive home (about 12 hours in the car) and I literally sat with my finger pressed into my eyelid (the only semi-comfortable position my eye could be) the entire time. It is
really difficult to try and keep your eye closed when it wants to be open and looking at things. Road trips are for seeing, no?

We got back home and the pain was getting worse, so we headed to Harris ER (savers of my arm, and quite possibly my life last time) where they gave me some numbing drops (boyfriend said they must have been loaded with mood enhancers as well, since my outlook on life changed
immediately upon application) and looked at my eyes with dye under a black light and said I have a corneal abrasion. Apparently your cornea is just loaded up with nerve endings, so it’s a bit of a painful thing.

They gave me a prescription for hydrocodone (my favorite oh darn!) and some antibiotic drops and sent me home feeling much better. I slept like a baby after nearly 48 hours of no sleep at all. I got up this morning at about 11:30 and went to open the front door to see if White Thing was out there wanting some crunchies and was blinded by the light. (Though not cut loose like a deuce or wrapped up like a douche or anything like that.) It was like instant migraine pain engulfing my entire head. The light was hurting me on the way home but not nearly this bad. Of course my eyes were closed and covered by fingers and sunglasses the whole time… but wow, this was seriously painful. It’s getting worse, too, which I don’t get, since the other pain is getting better (or is just masked by the hydrocodone?). I am sitting here writing this wearing sunglasses in my damn house because even at its lowest brightness setting, my screen is killing my eyes. I was in the back room doing laundry in my sunglasses.

I feel like Corey Hart or something.

I have an appointment with an ophthalmologist on Wednesday… I’m going to talk to him about this and also the dry eye thing… because this pain is not something that’s new. Only the severity of it this
time is what’s new. I’ve been waking up with my eyelid stuck to my eyeball off and on for about six weeks now. Generally it hurts just like this episode, but goes away within about an hour or so. It’s been
happening so frequently lately, though, that I’ve trained myself not to open my eyes too quickly when I wake up so that I don’t rip it. It seems to be OK if I take my time and allow some tears to build up with
pretend blinking before I open them completely. So, I don’t know if it’s possible that I have the chronic dry eye thing going on or if maybe I injured my eye six weeks ago and it’s just never healed
well… We were around a lot of smoke, sun and wind as well as recent painting and scraping of the house, so maybe that added to the injury? I guess I’m just trying to figure out which came first, the chicken or the egg here.

Here’s the scary eye:

Oh, and mental note to self: started period today. Joy.