Eyes are delicate, yo!

Do you know what isn’t fun? Having a corneal abrasion.

If you have never had the misfortune to have that, you are lucky, and I advise you to be very careful with anything vaguely sharp around your eyeballs, including mascara wands, which was the object of my own misfortune. Also, before I get into this, I promise I won’t post any creepy pictures of how my eyes looked all red, irritated, or puffy, and I won’t show you pictures of corneal abrasions... If you want to know, I leave that to you to look up. I’m just going to rant a little bit for my own amusement, and maybe so you can laugh at or sympathize with my pain and discomfort. (In case you don’t know it yet, by the way, there’s a great term from German to describe the enjoyment that we receive from witnessing or hearing/reading about another person’s pain, and that term is “Schadenfreude.”)

Anyway, the other day, I was doing my makeup as usual, and as I was doing my mascara, I was attempting to use the wand to separate a clump in the outside corner of my lashes, when, next thing I know, I’ve poked myself in the eye, and squeezed my eyes shut tight in defence. Thus, promptly and efficiently smearing wet mascara all over my top and bottom lashes. This seemed to be my biggest problem, once I got over the shock of the poke, I didn’t think I’d really damaged anything, just hurt myself a little and messed up my makeup a lot. I had to take it all off and try again, and I went on with the rest of my day.

About halfway through the day however, my eye started to hurt again, like there was something in it, but there was nothing to be seen, and my eyes were just tearing over and over again, until I didn’t know what was going on, my eye was getting red, and later my lids began getting puffed up. I tried washing out my eye with water, and I managed to bring down some of the swelling with a cold washcloth over my lids, but I ended up going to bed really late, with my eye still hurting, and feeling very worried.

I slept very little all night, and when I did, I woke up in the morning with my eye puffed up even more than before I fell asleep, and I was pretty much freaking out. My mom didn’t seem as worried, which was helpful, and she gave me a cotton pad with some witch hazel (pro tip: witch hazel is bloody amazing for taking down puffiness or inflammation, and it lasts forever!) on it to take down the swelling and began looking online for a walk-in clinic around us that was open on Sunday. There should have been one, but it was closed, so I was forced to go to the hospital. As we sat there, my eye slowly began getting better. After an hour and a half, I was in their “eye exam” room, where I sat for another 3 (Yes, three goddamn hours), while my eye continued to feel better, though it still hurt a fair bit, and I was starting to get a headache.

When a doctor finally appeared, he checked my eye, put a numbing drop in it, then a yellow/orange dye that fills in a corneal abrasion if there is one, and he looked at my eye in the dark under a cool blue light. If you look up corneal abrasion on Google, you can see the cool neon green of a scratch on a dark blue eye, it really isn’t that creepy, and I’m pretty creeped out by eyes. Anyway, he said that was the problem, and it should be better in no more than 48 hours, gave me some eye drops that are “basically Advil,” and I was done.

A few days later now, I finally had the confidence that my eye was alright, and I got to wear makeup again. It’s still a bit light-sensitive, which only makes sense, but I got by without using the drops every 4 hours, and I think I’m almost healed completely.

So, the moral of the story is this: be very careful with your eyes. Scratching your cornea fucking hurts, and your eyes may even puff up and make you scared for your eye’s existence.

Usually I’d ask for your comments, and I do like your comments, but please nothing too focused on your experiences with injured eyes, at least not the gory details... I can be pretty wimpy with that stuff. Thanks for reading!