Let this entry serve as further proof that this blog revolves around the mundane and trivial pursuits of our daily lives. Yesterday morning, I had a contact lens dilemma. Yeah, I think at least one of you will likely not enjoy this tale.
So, there I was, on the phone with Jen (she's visiting family in South Florida this week), and I made the fatal error of lightly rubbing my left eye. Next thing I know, there's a slight pang of discomfort underneath my upper eyelid and I've got depth perception issues out the wazoo. If you guessed that my contact lens moved slightly behind the eye, you guessed correctly.
Normally, I can resolve this by blinking about a dozen times, followed by pulling the eyelid up and watching the folded lens slide back down to my pupil. However, this little bugger was barely visible when I pulled the eyelid up. And, no matter how many times this has occurred in the past, my mind automatically goes into freak-out mode.
My first thought was that the contact will worm it's way behind my eye and into the secret confines of my skull. This, incidentally, is a myth, since the membrane behind the eye prevents anything from slipping behind it. Even though I have been armed with this knowledge since the very first day I ever had a slipped contact issue, the panic response is always stronger than the logic response.
My second thought was to gather myself together and try every remedy I could muster from my disjointed memory…the blinking, the eyelid-pulling, the light rubbing…surely I had forgotten a few since I was not getting any positive results from my efforts.
All the while, Jen patiently listened on speakerphone as I shifted from nonchalant indifference to slight anxiety to full blown manic reaction. Inevitably, conditioned as I have been for several years now by the familiar glowing beacon of my computer, I turned to the infernalnet for guidance. The following is the best collection of advice I've ever encountered to deal with this horrifying experience:
1. Pull up your upper lid while you look down at a mirror to search for the lens. Pull down your lower lid to search for the lens in the lower part of your eye. Proceed by moving your eye up, down and side to side. This might dislodge the lens.
2. Have a friend help. If you aren't too squeamish about letting someone else near your eye and you have a friend who is not too squeamish either, have them look up under your lid and gently pull the contact out with the pad of their finger while you hold the lid back and look down at them. This way you don't have to worry with looking at a mirror while you jab at your eye. Someone with slender, short-nailed fingers is best.
3. Squirt saline solution in the eye to dislodge it. Lean over a sink, hold your eyelid back with one hand and squeeze a bottle of contact solution with the other. You can angle a thin stream of saline solution up into places too narrow for your finger to reach. Just keep the drain closed if you don't want the contact to get washed away.
4. Take a break. Try to go about your business as normal, and in the course of your normal blinking and eye movement it might work its way out on it's own. So give it a little bit of time before you try anything drastic that might leave you with bloodshot irritated eyes.
5. When all else fails, close your eye and rub like heck. Don't put too much pressure rubbing downward toward the center of your eyeball, but rub in all directions at an angle to the surface of your eye. Rub, roll, and blink, and you might get that dang contact to move someplace reachable. Your eye will get irritated, but you might be finally able to get that dang contact.
I had already tried option 1, couldn't perform option 2, and definitely wanted to avoid option 5 (since that's what got me into this predicament to start with). So, I decided to try option 4 for a few minutes, then follow it up with a bit of option 3, and ultimately return to option 1. If you haven't figured it out yet, this is my coy attempt at making you go back and read all those little tidbits of advice.
Eventually, the contact slipped down from underneath the darkest regions of the eyelid. Normally, it will unfold and lay itself out, but this time was a bit different. The contact had folded over twice, causing the ever-alarming "taco effect." Not a tale for the squeamish, so naturally I'd want to share it with everyone I can.
1 comment:
that's horrible. I only wear my contacts when I'm playing goalie because I'm afraid of stuff like that happening, which it has - twice. same thing, I know (knew) it couldn't slide back, but that didn't alleviate my anxiety.
In my junior year of high school, in shop class, someone dropped a hammer onto the table and a thin layer of glue had hardened on the surface. When the hammer landed, it hit on the glue and a piece broke off and by some freak turn of events, found its way straight into my eye before sliding down into the corner. There was a girl sitting next to me that saw it happen, and (I didn't even know her name) she got up and looked in and said it was waaaay down to the side, so without thinking, I asked, "Can you get to it?" and she pulled it out somehow without breaking the thin chip. Needless to say, to let a complete stranger stick a finger in your eye just goes to show how nervewracking that stuff can be.
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