Mphf…whazzit? I lurch awake on the couch, having dozed off watching Iron Chef: Battle Broccoli. Half asleep, I stumble into the bathroom to yank out my contact lenses so I can go to sleep-blessed-sleep…
Crap. Little bugger. My left contact, feeling frisky, slides playfully behind my eyeball. “You can’t get me!” he teases.
“Get back here, you!” Don’t panic. I know the routine. Just roll my eyeball to the far right and nab that sneaky guy when he reappears.
No dice.
(Fifteen minutes later…)
Panic! Surf the net: “How to retrieve contact stuck behind eyeball.”
Advice received:
“Don’t panic!”
“Simple. Just roll your eyeball to the far right and nab that sneaky guy when he reappears.”
“Don’t worry. It’s not like it can slip into your brain or anything. I don’t think.”
“I heard that can make you go blind.”
“Stick your finger in your eye a lot and eventually you’ll find it.”
“Drink a glass of water upside down from the opposite side of your mouth…wait, that’s for hiccups. Sorry.”
“But whatever you do, don’t panic!”
I try everything that ever-wise Internet offers, most of it involving sticking my finger in my eye a lot and scratching the crap out of my now reddish eyeball. Now I’m getting tired, and panicking more. I wonder if I can fall asleep with a contact stuck behind my eyeball and worry about it in the morning?
Surf the net: “Can I fall asleep with contact stuck behind eyeball?”
Advice received:
“If you do, it will stick to the back of your eyeball and you’ll never get it out in a million years.”
“I did that once and my eye was stuck shut when I woke up.”
The overwhelming need to sleep kicks panic’s ass. I fall asleep dreaming that my contact has stuck to my eyeball and I’ll never get it out in a million years.
When I wake up the next morning, I set about to open my left eye, whispering a tiny prayer.
Whew…it opens. Barely, feeling like it was attacked by a pack of wild dogs.
Surf the net: “Is there an eye doctor open in Nashville on Sunday?”
Advice received: “The only eye doctor open today within a thousand-mile radius of Nashville, Tennessee, is in the Mall at Green Hills. At high noon, when everyone will be there.”
The Mall at Green Hills? But…but…that’s the mall into which I wouldn’t dare to set foot wearing a pair of blue jeans, much less sweats. The mall where the sales clerks won’t pay you any mind unless you’ve freshened your lipstick. Not to mention the mall where everybody knows my name. How am I supposed to show up in the middle of the Mall at Green Hills 1) without a speck of mascara on my invisible Midwestern-girl blonde eyelashes; and 2) eyeglasses, much less the only pair of eyeglasses I own, circa the mid-90s and two prescriptions ago?
“Because you don’t want to go blind,” my burning left eye sasses back to me.
I realize this sounds kind of vain, but I’m forever scarred by my painful history with glasses. In seventh grade I had this wire-rimmed squarish pair that matched the very squarishness of my short hairdo, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t break those glasses and with it my resulting nerddom. The eighth grade girls even felt that I, a seventh grader who’d beaten out one of the eighth-grade girls for a spot on the junior-high cheerleading squad because of my ability to do a one-handed cartwheel, didn’t deserve the spot because I was too nerdy.
Scarred for life, I’m telling you.
“Anyway, don’t worry,” says a friend on Facebook, “because everyone will be at the Titans game today, not the mall.”
Good point.
“Except possibly the eye doctor, who could be Mr. Right.”
Crap.
Back in the present and years past my nerdy days (um, right?), I choose healthy vision over my reputation. Come noon, I drive to Green Hills, squinting all the way and managing to mow down only a couple of objects in the process (possibly only one of them human). Having scoured the mall map beforehand, I know exactly what I have to do. I park surreptitiously in the parking lot closest to the eye doctor, speed-walk through the make-up section of the department store (ignoring the shouts of “We have special mascara that makes your eyes pop even behind thick glasses!”), and set a new world speed record sprinting across the mall to the eye doctor’s office.
Whew. Made it without seeing anyone I know. (I think. Not that I’d recognize them in these glasses.) No worries now, except for the cute eye doctor, who, I’ve now convinced myself, is tall, dark, handsome and into girls who’ve had that laser-eye surgery.
I follow the assistant to the back room with all the scary tools meant for poking someone’s eye out and await my fate. Finally, in walks…
…a pleasant blonde woman. “I’m Doctor Green,” she says. Whew again.
Doctor Green is very kind, and I don’t even mind (much) when she flips my eyelid twice (gross!), drops weird yellow dye into my eye and rubs her finger around and around on my swollen lid trying to locate the missing contact lens.
(Fifteen minutes later…)
“You have a very scratched up eye and a burst blood vessel, so don’t get nervous if your eye looks a little scary (read: demon-like) for a few days. But I can’t locate the contact. Maybe it came out already.”
“I really don’t think so. I know I would have seen it.”
She has the good grace to look like she believes me. “Don’t worry. It will come out in its own time if it’s in there. And I promise it won’t slip into your brain or anything like that.” I’m starting to think she’s really nice. Until she hands down the final sentence: “And…I hereby sentence you to four days in glasses.”
Say what?
Seventy bucks, a pit stop to Walgreens for seventy-buck eyedrops, and three crushed baby animals later, I slump into my house, where I’ll be holing up for the next four days with my…ugh…glasses and demon-like eyeball.
Later that day I’m dropping expensive potion into my eye in my bare feet when I step on something.
Crunch.
