so i went to the emergency room last night.
since i am now blogging about it, you can assume that it was not all that serious. but still freaked me out pretty good.
i was just sitting on the couch and rubbing my eye absentmindedly and when i stopped, my eye felt weird. like not good weird. i looked in the mirror and it seemed there was stuff on my it. since i had had a routine eye exam that morning to update my glasses prescription, i was kind of thinking about my eyes anyway because my doctor had wanted me to go back for another appointment to get my eyes dilated to check on my retina (since i'm getting to be an old lady).
i jump on webmd of course to try to figure out what's with my eye since i wasn't in any pain besides my eye looking red and crazy and watering. it wasn't really helpful besides listing a lot of crazy things that could be wrong with my eye. i called the nurse helpline and tried to describe what was going on. she recommended some home solutions, but also if i was concerned to go to urgent care or the emergency room. since i only have 2 eyes and i kinda need both of them, even if they are crazy nearsighted, i drove to the emergency room.
on the way there, i thought to myself this figures that my mom who's a nurse would be out of town when this happened. i suppose that might have been a blessing in disguise because even if she is a nurse, she's also my mom and might have just freaked out. i also tried to calm myself down from all the worst case scenarios that go spinning through your head in these situations. i figured that since my vision hadn't changed and my eye wasn't hurting that it couldn't be that bad and even might have a bit of an entertaining time wearing an eye-patch. such is my coping strategy, people.
when i got there, it was almost 11. it didn't seem very busy, but when you tell the triage nurse that you are 0-1 on the pain scale, you are not a high priority. so i lay on the bed and watched some conan o'brien and simpsons reruns. basically what i might have done at home on the couch anyway, if i didn't have work the next day. the nurse practitioner thought maybe i had scratched my eye, or something had gotten into my eye that i had inadvertently rubbed in, even though i don't recall being bothered by anything- it just came out of nowhere. she said it looked like my eye was allergic to something, even though i don't have any allergies. her test showed that i didn't have any scratches, so then i just waited around for them to irrigate my eye. which is basically having sterile water squirted on my eyeball. it sounds terrible but actually felt really good afterward. had to go the pharmacy to get the prescription for my eyedrops and Allegra and got home at 3 am. i was partly exhausted and partly wired from the adrenaline of freaking out. and kind of hungry. i guess having a minor medical emergency works up an appetite.
needless to say, i did not make it to work today. happily my eye has now returned to a more normal appearance. i mean, for a little while there i thought i had somehow rubbed off the surface of my eye - i know that sounds physcially impossible, but it really looked like that in the mirror. yeesh.
what a wednesday/thursday.
No comments:
Post a Comment