Caution: This will make your eyes water

This weekend I ended up in the emergency room thanks to a contact lens. The simplest way to explain why is to declare upfront that I am an export grade idiot. Simply put, contact lenses and I are not a good combination. Over the years, I’ve had some eye-watering experiences with these slippery little pieces of plastic.

The other day, for instance, I accidentally poured my last set of contact lenses down the sink, forcing me to switch to glasses. Then, lo and behold, I discovered a pair I’d forgotten about. So I’d abandoned them in the first place because I’d accidentally put antibacterial handwash (don’t ask, it’s a long story) in the lens cases, but I thought I’d give them a try anyway.

This is why I now have a painfully swollen left eye. The left lens, as it turned out, was completely saturated with the handwash, and while it wasn’t so painful at the time, after I removed the damn thing I knew all about it. I was in agony for the rest of the day, nose streaming from the tears leaking into my sinuses, and woke up the next morning with my eye half closed, looking like a drunk.

As the day wore on, it got worse. Imagine someone squirting lemon juice into your conjunctiva at regular intervals and you’ll have an idea of what it felt like. Sluicing my eye out with saline solution didn’t help. It got so bad that I started weeping and pacing, which is why, after Sunday lunch (we discussed ET and he-who-shall-not-be-named) I ended up at Sunninghill Hospital.

I’d insisted wearing contacts in the first place because I wanted to make a good impression on my lunch companion. Didn’t want to look all nerdy, with the glasses and all. And then I refused to remove it on the suggestion of said lunch companion because I didn’t want to walk half blind … which, of course, is exactly what I did for the next 24 hours.

This was not my first contact lens disaster by any means. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve lost lenses at the back of my eye. This happens when the lens slips behind your eyeball; while sometimes it’s possible to retrieve it by rubbing your eye, most of the time all you can do is wait.

Occasionally up to several days.

Then there are the times I’ve scratched my cornea trying to remove a lens. The times I’ve tried to remove lenses I wasn’t even wearing (you’d think I’d notice that the world was somewhat more chiaroscuro than usual, but the force of habit is a powerful one, especially when one is as switched off as I am). Last year, I lost a pair during a trip to Mpumalanga, when I stored them in a glass because I’d forgotten my contact lens case. My mother drank them in the middle of the night.

Eventually some nice, but not especially impressive young doctor put a yellow substance in my eye which numbed the pain … but only temporarily. Eventually, in desperation, my mother took me to a pharmacy where I picked up Voltaren drops, not the kind you use on your back, the kind you put in your eyes (there is a difference). So I can see well enough to drive, which is something. As an aside, everything in this blog entry besides this paragraph was typed on an iPhone. When you’re squinting through one barely functional eye, poking at a virtual keyboard is easier than scrabbling myopically across the keys.

I think I might use the iPhone for future blog entries — say for the next time I demonstrate a direct causal relationship between a contact lens and the emergency room. As my mother says when she shakes her head: “Only you, Sarah. Only you.”