The hole in the retina story

So I slept with my lenses in last night, and when I got up this morning one of them had crept up and had gone way up in my eye socket. I kept trying to get it back, but all it did was to push it back farther and farther, and before you knew it, I had a contact lens in the back of my eye, out of reach. It’s an incredibly uncomfortable feeling, when its *just* out of reach, but you know its there, your eyeball is all bloody and bruised from your attempts at retrieving the damn piece of plastic... Well, anyway, it floated back on its own a few hours later, but all this reminded me of a little eye incident I had last year. Here it is.


It happened when I was playing indoor soccer – it was one of those league games where you got a bunch of teams with hugely varying skill levels. The good ones would sniff each other out during pick-up games, get each others’ numbers, and form a team which would annihilate the opposition by an average score of 22-0, and so they’d be happy. The really crappy teams were full of dumb blondes and hippy kids who didn’t care what the result of the game was. “Aw, we’re just here to have fun! (joyous clapping of hands).” “ Oooo, Emma, what pretty pink socks you have on today!” and so they were happy because they didn’t give a flying fuck. In between were teams like us, which had reasonably good players and a bunch of deadweights who scored every once in a while by pure chance. Like me. We were the perennially unhappy ones, because we’d lose to the good teams, and we’d only beat the lousy ones 5-2. We were also the only ones that actually showed up on non-league games to discuss strategy and try out set pieces. Yeah, we were that team.

Anyway, this one time, we were playing with a team of pansies, and this grossly overweight dude was flapping around like a beached whale during the entire game, flitting around the ball like a fifth-grader. This dude had the danger trifecta down - hugely obese, badly coordinated, and extraordinarily enthusiastic. I should’ve stayed away from him, but we ended up chasing the same ball, he got in ahead of me, and with a mighty hip heave, kicked the ball with all the force he could.

Right. Into. My. Eye.

It happened so quickly, I didn’t have time to blink, let alone avoid the projectile heading right toward my face. The thing hit my eyeball directly, and I was blinded for a good hour in one eye; Some of the vision came back and the pain went away, but by next morning, I knew something was wrong; I couldn’t see out of the bottom of my right eye. (I would later learn that the jackass blew a hole through my retina). The doctor took one look at it and told me tersely that I needed to get surgery to prevent the whole retina from coming detached. So they wheeled me into the Operating Room right away.

Which is when it got painful.

They asked me if I'd want anesthesia delivered intra-ocularly. Which basically means they inject the anesthetic directly into your eyeball. I did a Sarah Palin (“Thaynks, but no Thaynks.”) because just the thought of an injection into my eyeball made me want to vomit. They said "Well, OK. No worries, its only going to be a little uncomfortable", so I said “Go ahead.” And gave them a cheerful thumbs-up. They turned the lights off, except for the surgeon’s lamp, a nurse wordlessly wheeled in a tray of instruments, and the doctor quietly started counting them off. All of a sudden, the OR took on the look of a cold torture chamber, but hey, these guys were here to help, right? So I took a deep breath, tried to take my mind away from my massively bunched up shorts, and attempted to relax. But it got worse.

First, they forced my eye open (like they did to Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange) so I couldn’t blink. And then they put q-tips and spatulas in the gap between my eyeball and socket, and leveraged my eyeball partially out of the socket to expose it. By this time, my sphincter was going into spasms, but I soldiered on. Surely this was almost over by now. But no, they then prodded it, poked at it, shone lights at it, and just when I was ready to pass out, they asked me "So, shall we start?" Oh, Jesus, no.

Which is when, dear friends, they turned on the laser (Giant exaggerated quotes). Now, this wasn’t some dinky ass light that you can use as a pointer, or to check out groceries, or use as a trip alarm. No, no, no. This thing could burn holes through paper held half a mile away. This is what they use to beam signals in binary code to extraterrestrial beings. This is what they used on Khaled Shiekh Mohammed’s ass when he was down at Gitmo. This thing was the Guns of Navarone of lasers. They turned it on (it was green. The 488nm kind) and shot it at my dilated pupil. Of course, since my eyes were forced open, I had no choice but to stare right at the damn thing as it annihilated my pupil, cornea, retina, optic nerve and the half of my brain that happened to be in the wrong half of my skull. Plus the damned thing came in these short pulses, each of which felt like someone was trying to nail gun my eye to the back of my skull.

The laser was bad enough that along with the left half of my face it also destroyed the manly ego that was my steadfast companion when I was wheeled into the OR. I had to tell them to stop after about 10 pulses. I asked (well, pleaded) for anesthesia, intra-ocular or otherwise. I was ready to take up a giant shot of morphine up the ass to stop the pain. “Too bad, yogi”, they said. “We've started this thing, we’ve got to finish this now. Sorry buddy. Well, here’s a wooden spoon. Bite on it, it might help.”

And then they go on to give me TWO HUNDRED AND NINETY MORE LASER PULSES. TWO. HUNDRED. AND. NINETY. By the end I had lost all sense of sight and sound (but not sense of pain, sadly), I was watering from every orifice in my body, and was pretty much ready to admit to being a North Korean spy, Mexican drug lord and Osama bin Laden’s man-whore all rolled into one. I mean, I was in some serious pain, while the jackass eye-surgeon was probably laser-etching his signature on the back of my eyeball… traumatic.

Anyway, all that stuff rolled through my head this morning as I was trying to grope around my eyeball to get to me lens, and I thought I should tell you all about it.

ps : Recovery only took a couple days. My other eye learned to compensate, and I really can’t tell anything's wrong except if I'm trying to read out of the bottom right of my left eye as I'm winking in the dark.

pps : When given the choice, don’t be a hero. Ask for anesthesia.