I managed to take a vacation day on Friday and flee to a short adventure. My best friend in life, Mike, lover of doggies with spots over one eye and other goofy people like myself, has a family of sisters that I spent a lot of time with and love, and visit whenever they come. I’m Auntie to their kids.
My little surrogate niece Chloe is a competing junior golfer (youngest level) and San Diego was the scene for the Juniors tournament. I couldn’t pass up seeing her and sister Naomi, my favorite small pal right now, as well as their mom, my big pal, Mari, and their dad Alex, since they’ve been across the globe in Guam for a while. I was too late for the competition, but since her first tournament was turning Chloe into a bundle of nerves, I would only have been added pressure. Two days and a basket of flowers later, she regained her confidence and played well at the end; that was all we were looking for.
So I high-tailed it into the sunset Thursday night after she finished with my trusty GPS Jane directing the way at every lane-change. God I love technology! There is just no substitute for someone talking you through the baffling signage of the L.A. freeway system when it’s that grey time of twilight. Before I’d left, my husband was all “Be careful!” and seemed to pay more attention to kissing me goodbye. He was genuinely concerned. That only worried me more, since it means he knows I’m a completely helpless, compass-less mess should our Jane go down, even apart from the usual freeway calamities.
But I arrived with all pieces of the car in place and stayed with them all in a hotel as big as a sprawling Las Vegas casino that had rooms like posh closets. But hey, the bed was great, and there was a 9-hole practice course out there to go watch Chloe tink around on in the morning. (Watching Chloe golf is kind of like watching a Chaplin movie. This is a girl who loves her stuffed bunny, but on the course, she’s all business: silently positioning, siting, calculating, WHACK, and then picks up her set of clubs that’s longer than she is tall and goes pad pad pad pad pad off in her teensy Nikes, her long black ponytail swishing under a little white Hello Kitty ribboned bow. I was speeding it up in my mind and it cracked me up completely.)
After golf, it was a long day of Legoland with my two little pals — roller coasters, even, which for me is like sending myself to the moon. Motion rides I can usually do only if it’s centrifugal, and to actually progress on to anything outside of a tight circle, I must calculate the last time I ate, how many house-heights that thing is, and after much mental preparation, dread and boredom and more launch dread and finally buckling in, while everyone else is just having a whooshing good time, I’m all claws going through hypertransport WHOOOOOAAAAAA and I don’t come out the same at the other end, some of me having been left where Scotty beamed me. I did this TWICE I tell you. Maternal love will conquer anything, really.
The trip was a great party until the next morning, when they were to leave for San Francisco and then Singapore, and I was to get back to my Jane GPS and head north. That’s when I made that kind of judgment call that only a person with my middle class overbudgeted background would make and picked up THE WRONG BOTTLE, Mari’s bottle, of what I THOUGHT was saline/cleaner solution. I had thought it would be better to use her big bottle than waste my little bottle, which was just the right size for airplane travel, and which I might NEVER FIND AGAIN since it was a sample size given me by my optician, and I looked at Mari’s label to be sure it was solution and saw no caution signs, and so I rinsed my contac lense and put in my eye and
OH GOD. It was that ACID that made for protein removal. Acid that should have a neutralizer tablet added to it before you even opened the case in the morning to put your contac in your hand. It might have been straight hydrochloric acid for all I knew. I panicked, the pain was so intense I winced so hard that I couldn’t open my eye to get the contac OUT and then when I finally pried it out and rinsed and rinsed and rinsed my eye with water, the pain was just not going away.
I would lie to say that I had not done this once before. Yes, I know I know. But here’s the problem. This happened twice for the same reason. The Ciba company packages regular cleaner and this specialized acid protein-removal cleaner in virtually the same packaging. There is no different colored label, there is no giant CAUTION DO NOT PUT IN EYES warning, there is NOTHING. The first time it happened was not so bad because I somehow managed to rinse more quickly; afterward I took the bottle and tablets and all of it and threw it away. I just didn’t want that mistake happening again, confusing it with my saline. But now here it was AGAIN.
Mari and Alex were hastily packing, gathering up their girls’ things; I, all slow motion at the sink while Grand Central was waltzing around me, rinsed yet again and again after a while, looking blearily for a “what to do if it gets in eyes” how-to set of instructions in fine print. Nothing. Mari had had this happen too before, and we agreed after rinsing, it should just go away eventually.
I said my goodbyes to them in my glasses, and began the drive two hours back north with a watering right eye, wondering if that would help, all this flowing of tears should help, right? There was no point in waiting to drive later. If I did, the traffic would be monumentally worse; L.A. to San Diego is a giant mall-race madness on Saturdays.
So I drove with trusty Jane all the way back, only to pull off at my freeway exit to a traffic cop instead of a stoplight. And then there was another cop at the next intersection, and the next. I drove through this gauntlet of dead lights and began to realize we were having A HUGE BLACKOUT. People were on their doorsteps, talking, asking each other the same question, Is yours out too?, and at last after a few near misses from people running lights, I was Safe, Home, and carrying my bags up three flights of stairs where there was no elevator service, and no air conditioning, and I CAN’T SEE from my right eye, and the halls are BLACK. Great, I’m in agony and L.A. is in complete chaos.
A half hour later it was worse. Do we go to the emergency room in a blackout or NOT?
The eye was killing me, so a call was made to poison control, and the acid-bottle story was told.
GO! they said. Go to Hollywood Presbyterian, you need to be seen.
So that’s how I came to have a 100 dollar Saturday even after my weekend trip was over, and my husband’s BE CAREFUL premonition had a whole new meaning.
The pain-numbing drops had worn off when they told me the reason it was taking so long (an hour had passed and I still hadn’t seen any sign of the doctor).
I was just thinking I want to sue Ciba corp, but right now I shouldn’t complain, things could be worse Ow OW OW OW, when they wheeled by an old woman on a gurney with a gaping mouth. Um, I think that person’s dead. Ow OW. Ow.
Finally the nurse came in on our request for more pain drops at least. “Sorry, someone’s died, and there’s one doctor on shift,” said the nurse.
Shit! She WAS dead. Ow. Ok God, I get it, that was a little heavy-handed, don’t you think?. Ok. Ok. OK OWWWWW.
A red-haired blobby looking doctor with an accent that seemed to roam between Israel and Norway came in and cheerily told us that I essentially had a scraped cornea. He enlisted my husband’s help with catching the drips in a basin from his merry irrigating — the acid had begun to eat a hole in my eye covering, he said. GREEEAT. I get antibiotic goo in my eye and Vicodin painkiller (inserting “woohooo!” for someone else here who might like that stuff on that point, I myself have enough of a struggle with gravity, without using that stuff…) and they tape gauze over me while I’m having Butterfly and Diving Bell tremors. I’m being half-mummified.
We drive toward home through lights out and lights out in the heat and decide we might as well get food, I’m starving. Have you ever noticed how trauma makes you suddenly STARVING? At our favorite Mexican restaurant, in a section of town that still has air conditioning thank god, and being led on Alex’s arm, I am suddenly the invisible girl. I am freaking out everyone who sees me. No one wants to be reminded of an eye illness.
Now I know what to do if I ever have to go out alone at night, I think to myself. Just put on an eyepatch, absolutely NO ONE will want to mess with you.
Except maybe Mike, my best friend, who always takes home strays with an eyepatch, without whom I would never have met Mari, or her evil bottle of Ciba acid. He’ll like me at least, right?. Ow.
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