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Staring in horror into the mirror, I watched my right eyeball begin to...grow. On the white part where the contact lens had vaccuumed itself, there was now a little, perfectly circular pocket of saggy eyeball "skin". I don't actually know what the proper terminology is, but what I thought of when I first saw it was the very thin, transparent outer layer of an onion -- the stuff you peel off before you start chopping it up. Apparently, when I pried the contact off my eye, the outer "skin" that was suctioned up inside the convex lens had pulled away from the inner "meat" of the eye. And that little sac of transparent flesh was starting to fill with fluid. Reddish fluid from somewhere in the middle of my eye!
I'm going blind! I thought in terror, and I immediately tested my vision for the first of a thousand times by holding a hand over the uninjured left eye. I could still see from the right eye, for which I was glad, but clearly there was something wrong. As I continued to watch the little pocket of skin fill with a milky, reddish fluid that surely included some blood, I noticed that I could no longer easily close my right eyelid. A natural response when the eye is injured is to close it, but since the eyeball was effectively swelling up, I had trouble closing the eyelid over the eyeball, thus creating the appearance of a freakish, bulging blob of an eyeball slowly creeping out of the socket.
This is what I imagined.
I staggered into the bedroom and grabbed the phone. My wife was at work and my kids were still at school, so I considered calling 9-1-1, but my doctor's number was on the back of the phone, so I thought I would try him first. When the receptionist answered, she must have sensed the panic in my voice: "There is something horribly wrong with my eye! I need to see a doctor immediately! I'm afraid I'll lose my vision!" She assured me that they could get me right in, and I think I hung up before I had even given my name or the name of my doctor. Then it dawned on me: I would have to drive to the doctor's office.
Like I said, I could still see, but I was shaking in terror, wondering if my eyeball was going to continue expanding until it exploded in my head. These are not ideal conditions under which to drive a car, especially when I was looking progressively more hideous as the eyeball grew and pulsated. But, I had no choice. I grabbed a pair of prescription sunglasses to cover the gore of my right eye, and I drove myself to the doctor's office. I remember very little about that trip, and I think I am lucky to have made it without hurting anyone or killing myself.
By the time I arrived at the doctor, I could feel my pulse in the bloody, swollen eyeball, and I kept checking my vision by holding my hand in front of my good eye to make sure I could still see from the bad one. I left the sunglasses on even when I went into the office because there were children in the waiting room, and I didn't want to scare them. As it turned out, the children were the least of my concern.
"It is alive!"
True to her word, the receptionist got me right back into an examination room, but she said that my doctor was not actually in today. She assured me that there were others in the office who could help me, and a few moments later in walked the "doctor" who was going to examine me. She must have been fresh out of medical school because she didn't look much older than some of my ninth-grade students. She was small, and her voice was whispery and kind: "What seems to be the problem today?"
I removed the sunglasses.