March 23, 2006 :: One-eyed jack

First, I will apologize for leaving you all with nothing but stale old posts for a while. I haven't had a lot to say lately, but I have a couple of things I can share with you.

A couple of Sundays ago, I got poked in the eye. It was a freak accident involving a stripper, that's all you need to know about how it happened. The interesting part is what happened afterwards. It hurt like hell (burned is probably more accurate), and continued into the next day, so I scheduled an emergency appointment with my doctor, who immediately sent me to an opthalmologist.

The eye doc declared that I had a corneal abrasion (that is to say, it was scratched and he could see it with his super scope). He put a bunch of goop in my eye and made me wear a patch over it. It wasn't a cool sexy black eye patch like pirates wear, it was a round white gauze pad with a bunch of clear surgical tape across half my face holding it in place. So I had to drive around with one eye (which was difficult at first but got easier) and do basic errands like going to the grocery store or the drug store.

In different places, people reacted differently. At Safeway, the customers looked like the Elephant Man had just walked in and asked to kiss their child... people shied away from me like I had the plague. In other places, people just looked at me and greeted me normally. I guess that probably gave me 10% of the experience of what it's like, socially speaking, to be disabled.

I wore the patch for 3 days, and then got to take it off. Never in my life have I been so glad to have two eyes, and to have regained my depth perception. But I still had to put this goopy ointment in it 4 times a day for the next week. Despite my best efforts, it resulted in one eye looking shiny most of the time, which as it turns out was a bigger detraction than the patch. I guess with the patch, people know you are injured in some way, but with a shiny eye, people just think something is weird about you. Thankfully I don't have to use that goop anymore, except at night when no one can see anyway.

And as for the stripper... I think she felt bad for me or something, because she gave me her number and told me to call. So I did, and I asked how she was going to make it up to me, and her answer was "ummm... we can go in the VIP all night." Wrong answer. Oh well, I should know better than to have any expectations of someone as young as she was. And no, I'm not suing anyone. It was a freak accident!

In the next episode, I'll have a rant about dating. Stay tuned!

posted by Rainmayun at 10:42 AM -