So, I never got a patch. They don’t do them anymore, on account of it slowing the natural healing process of your eye. Which is a real shame, because I was going to draw a skull and crossbones on mine and that would have been a fun time.
I spent most of yesterday relentlessly putting drops in my eyes, annoying little drops that required holding shut my tear duct so that the medicine stayed in my eye. This is all a result of having the most over-dramatic eye in the history of eyes. Of course I couldn’t just have a little corneal scratch. No, no. It had to be a corneal ulceration, and then my eye had to go and completely overreact to the thing, causing iritis (inflammation of the iris, which Kate thinks sounds made up), which is what puffed my eye up like it was the Quasimodo of eyes.
After my first appointment, I was pretty down and trodden, and it didn’t help that the sweet blissful anesthetic (from the dilation) was wearing off while I spent 15 minutes at 47th and 5th trying to get a goddamned taxi to pay attention to me. So I went home, took a lot of advil and got some rest. The boys came home in time for me to start feeling a lot better but I was still really puffy, see photo.
That night, when I was close to tears from the pain, Stuart promised to come to the morning follow-up appointment. Which helped a lot – I love my new eye specialist (who knew I needed an eye specialist) but it’s always nice to have another brain in the room to absorb information, especially when the information is about how your eye is in a little heap of trouble.
My doctor took one look at me that morning and said, “yeah, I wasn’t sure it was iritis last night but I dliated you just in case – it’s definitely iritis,” and prescribed me an anti-inflammatory drop, thank you sweet jesus Rubenstein. So armed to the teeth with four prescriptions and a schedule for dosage more complicated than Leonardo’s flying machines, Stuart sweetly deposited me, dilated and disoriented, into a taxi Astoria-bound. After filling the scripts I took to the couch and felt the drugs work their magic.
It’s been two days of paying far too much attention to my overly dramatic eye. There’s a bunch of other stuff, too, that the doctor armed me with – stuff about my auto-immune system and how it might be malfunctioning just the slightest bit and how I’m a good girl for coming right in with the eye drama but if I could just be still a few minutes longer, there’s a host of diseases that want to meet me, please.
I’m not going to let myself worry about auto-immune systems and self/non-self and things that start with the letters HLA until I absolutely have to. Proscrastination is a way of life.
My eye is fine and thanks you for all the attention.