In order to become a medical doctor, one must take a course in anatomy in which one participates in the dissection of an entire human body. One system at a time, over the course of many weeks, students meticulously examine every aspect of what makes a person: every muscle, bone, blood vessel; every fiber of flesh; every morsel of gristle. This course is often called "gross anatomy" for a variety of reasons, but the one most of you will appreciate is the fact that it is gross. What goes on under our skin is not something most of us care to spend much time pondering, but anyone who has earned an M.D. is intimately familiar with all of it. In other words, there is not much the human body can do that will surprise most doctors because they have seen it all.

That's why the doctor's response to my bulging, pulsating, bleeding, hideous eyeball alarmed me a bit. I was hoping she'd simply shine a light into my face and reassure me: "Oh, yes. I've seen this before. Not uncommon at all. Just a bit of perfectly normal swelling. Happens occasionally to everyone. Nothing to worry about! You'll be right as rain in the morning!" Instead, this fresh-faced, delicate, young, and innocent new doctor buckled at the knees, turned pale, and gasped, "I've never seen anything like that before in my life!" A look of horror on her face, she regained her balance and began to back away from me, her arm protectively held out as though warding off a zombie.

"What's wrong with it?!" I asked, close to panic.

"I don't know!" she croaked, still backing towards the door.

"You gotta help me!" I begged.

"I'm going to do some research," she said, opening the door and heading out. "I'll be back in a few minutes. Don't...poke it...or anything...."

By this time, my eyeball had swollen enough that I physically could not close my eye without supreme effort, but I had done the hand-cover test enough times to reassure myself that I wasn't, in fact, losing my vision...yet. I could still see, and when I looked at myself in the mirror on the wall of that small exam room, I almost threw up. Imagine a peeled plum, dripping purplish liquid and oozing goo down my cheek. That's what I saw. I put the sunglasses back on to cover myself. "I'm hideous," I moaned.

Ten minutes or so later, the delicate young doctor was back. She had her cell phone in one hand, a giant medical textbook in the other. She was on the phone with a doctor at one of the area eye centers, and she took a picture of the groteque mass that used to be my right eye and sent it to that doctor for a "second opinion." I would have been happy for a first opinion, but much of what they were saying was cloaked in medical jargon, which I probably would have been able to decipher if I had not been freaking out.

"Did you hit your eye on something? Poke something into it? Dip it in boiling water?" she questioned me, nodding at each negative response. She finally got around to shining a light into it, prodding it with various swabs and gentle tools, and pronouncing joyously, "Well, at least it has quit swelling!" I still couldn't shut my eye, but I guess there was some consolation in knowing that it wasn't going to continue expanding until it exploded.

Thirty minutes later, after conversations with two other doctors (one in a different state), she released me with a handful of antibiotic drops, a prescription for a pill of some kind, and an ice pack: "Keep the ice on it. Get some rest. If the swelling doesn't go down by tomorrow morning, come back in. I think it will be fine."

"Yeah, but what is it?" I asked. "Why did this happen?"

She shrugged: "I can't say for sure. Maybe an impact. Could be an allergic reaction. It's kind of a mystery...."

I never did make it to class that night, and my homework didn't get turned in until the following week, but I did follow the doctor's orders. When I woke up the next morning, my eyeball was back to its normal size and shape (whew!), but the color was all wrong. The white of the eye was still a bloody, horrifying mess, the eye of a demon. Darth Eyeball. Ugh! Digusting to look at. There is no way I could go in and teach ninth graders all day with an eye like this. They'd puke on the desks, faint at the sight, run screaming from the school. I would have to cover it up.

So, that day I wore my sunglasses to school. (In fact, I didn't wear contact lenses for a month afterwards.) The shades provided a better environment for my sensitive eye, and no one could see through them to the horror that lay beneath the lenses. But you know how ninth graders are....

"Hey, Thompson! What's with the sunglasses? You tryin' to be cool or something?"

"Nice shades, Poindexter! Very cool!"

And, of course, "Why are you wearing sunglasses inside the school?"

"Trust me," I said, "you don't want to know."

"Oh but we do! We do! Tell us!"

"Um, I really don't think you want to see what's under here. It will scare you."

"No it won't," they cried. "Show us!"

And so it went all day: "Show us!! Show us!!" It became boring, then frustrating. So much so that I started fantasizing about ripping off those shades and hitting them with something like this:

You asked for it!

Alas, I couldn't really do that, and by the end of the day, they had worn me down. I finally gave them what they wanted. When I removed the sunglasses for that final class of the day, my eye looked just like this.