In the blink of an EYE

This is a true story. It's also a stupid story, but one I'm compelled to tell (not really). It's about my eyes. Well, more specifically, it's about the contacts that go IN my eyes. It's a saga that frustrated me at the time but I knew I'd be laughing about soon enough! Well, that time has come...

So, last night I get to work and realize my contacts are cloudy and dryish. Backing up, I had accidentally slept in my contacts the night before, and wondered why the cloudy/blurry vision when I woke up. I thought it was because of my humidifier, which emits a vapor-like smog throughout my room (I swear, I could write a whole blog about how much I'm loving that humidifier!) But the vapor never makes my eyes crusty and swollen, so I revisited the possibility of sleeping in the contacts...and I realize that I can indeed SEE far away, so I MUST have slept in them! Hateful. Further inspection in the mirror revealed great amounts of redness so I removed the offending contacts and threw some others in.
Blah blah blah, head to work and notice the cloudy/dryishness of both eyes. I realized 12 hours is way too long to be in such discomfort, so I plan on driving home between feeding my babies to grab a new pair. Remember that I live in Saratoga Springs and am currently in American Fork, which means I'm at least a day's travel from home, because, well, SS is basically a day's travel from ANYWHERE (except the Walmart and Smiths, which keeps me sane). Then genius strikes: I have an amazingly kind roommate who is NOT working! She takes pity on me and meets me at Target, contacts in hand. Too bad I couldn't go shopping--after all, I WAS in Target's parking lot....still technically at work....bummer!
I can hardly make the drive back to work before I'm ripping out the offensive eye covers...except I realize, shortly after I took the first one out and chucked it in the garbage, that I can't really see without them. Hmmmm. So I close the naked eye and make my way to the parking lot and safely in a stall before I pull out the other one. As I'm about to toss it, the little kid comes out of me and I decide to leave it on my dash so I can see how crispy it has become by morning! (Don't you just love when contacts do that??? I found it out the hard way one night years ago at Steve and Amber's when I stayed overnight and just put my contacts in a lid with NS--apparently, they dry up if not in an enclosed case. It was a terrible lesson then, but one I have fun with now, apparently!)
I run back into the hospital and straight to the bathroom to plug the new guys in. Lefty goes in without a hitch, but Righty needs some coaxing in the form of a squirt of saline. A piece of the universe is in there, under the lens, which is probably the tiniest of dust mites, but for anyone who's had the experience, it feels like a whole beach-ful of sand has taken up residence on your eyeball! I think the saline is helping and head back to the nursery, hoping to be done with the eye issues for the night. Wrong. The situation becomes a debacle when the tiny beach becomes every piece of sand on the northern hemisphere! It's at that point that I can't even open my eye due to the immense discomfort, so I go running back to the bathroom where I pour more NS in there, hoping to flush it out....now I've just created an ocean of sand and water, all mixed in my freaking eye. What now? I remove the affecting lens and find out he's completely ripped! My brand new contact is totally shredded! No wonder.
Now I'm down to one good contact....out of the 4 I've had with me in the past 2 hours. Nice. I can't possibly finish my shift (10+ hours left of it, at this point) with one decent eye....major headache if I even try. So what do I do? Yep, run like the wind down to my car to retrieve the dash decoration, and immediately put it in my mouth to keep it hydrated until I can get to an NS syringe! Yes I did. Spent the rest of my night with one new contact and one totally crappy one. Lived tho. And saw everything I needed to see.....I hope :)
Fast forward to today, when my right eye is still super red and raw from all that scratching. Almost called in sick to work (no I didn't) but got put on call for the whole shift (love it).
Moral of the story? I don't know if there is one, except maybe in addition to all the receipts, gum, camera, ibuprofen, excedrin, phone, headphones, ipod, keys, wallet, antibiotics and cash I have floating around in my Mary Poppins purse, I should maybe keep a spare pair of contacts in there for such a night as this!
As possibly crazy as this might sound, I actually have a picture to accompany this post--not during the actual events, but of the eye in question--although definitely on a better day...