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Corneal Ulcer. Left eye. Joy oh joy.

Not only do I find even the slightest glimmer of light unbearable, but I also get to retire my contact lenses for a few weeks and don my super nifty plastic-rimmed glasses. The only thing more attractive than a girl with a puffy left eye is a girl wearing glasses over her black eye patch contraption reminiscent of Madonna’s pointy bra cup. Spicy hot.

I could spend hours detailing the hellish progression since last Friday. What started as an ostensibly benign redness blew up into a puffy, hypersensitive mess. The one resident on staff at the Eye and Ear Infirmary (the only center still open after 5pm) kept shining bright lights directly into my eye while trying to pry it open to take a peak. I spent nearly five hysterical hours there that night in the blindingly bright waiting room. After that miserable ordeal, I had to spend the next two days sitting in my dark apartment wearing sunglasses and bombarding my scarred eye with antibiotics and dilation drops and creams. I was confined to my living room for the entire weekend, the only place in my apartment without windows. Even computer screens and monitors irritated my eye. I couldn’t even read because my vision was blurred. I just ate. And slept. Ate again. Slept again.
How did this happen? I made a really lousy choice. When my left contact lens fell out, I put it into my mouth when I found it a few minutes later and stuck it back in my eye. I later asked the doctor if it was wrong to put a lens in my mouth (I was under the false impression that it somehow cleaned it) and she retorted, “Honey, it’s like taking your eyeball and licking it. All the bacteria in your mouth went on your eye. Would you ever lick your eyeball?”

Valid point. I would not.

I wish I could go back in time and stop myself from putting that contact lens back into my mouth (bad Alyssa! No licking your eyeball!). But I can’t. All I can do now is try to make the best of a not-so-fantastic situation.  I’ve been diligently inundating my eye with different treatments and visiting eye doctors almost every other day, but my biggest fear now is not the healing process. I’m afraid that one day, long after the ulcer is gone, I won’t be thinking about possible long-term repercussions and make a quick, stupid decision. Again.

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