There were two note-worthy experiences that occurred over Thanksgiving break which were memorable in…very different ways than the rest of the break.

The first occurred before I even got home. You see, I’m currently enrolled in an online philosophy course, and since it’s only an 8-week course, it doesn’t break for holidays. Thus, there were assignments due over the week of Thanksgiving, and so I decided that my time in the airport would be well-spent if I used it to read for my philosophy class (we read a book every week…more reading than I’ve done in quite some time for one class, but…enriching, doubtless).

So I was reading a fascinating book about the art of Metaphysics while I sat at my gate. I would glance at my watch every little while to see how close my plane was to departure. I remember at one point looking up and thinking, “Odd. Why are they not boarding? It’s definitely time for them to be boarding.” I decided—in a rather naïve display of lack of airport savvy—to go check one of the flight screens in the hall, to see if the gate had possibly been switched without them announcing it.

The gate hadn’t been switched. The screen read that my flight was “boarding.” Oh. Ok. By the time I got back to the gate, I could see the plane slowly backing away, headed towards the runway. Fail.

First time I’ve ever missed a flight because I was reading in the airport. I groaned inwardly as I rescheduled for a flight that left seven hours later, realizing that my five siblings would never pass up such a prime opportunity to tease their oldest sister about acting blonde. (They didn’t, either). But I was grateful that there WAS another flight going to Wisconsin that day—would have been a bit more of a bummer if missing the first flight would have meant spending the night in the airport.

The second incident occurred the morning after we got back (my poor father drove until nearly two in the morning to get us both home from Milwaukee that night in time for my sister’s bridal shower the next morning…he was SOOO wiped)

When we got home at almost two, several of my family members were still awake—plus my sister’s fiancé was over, and his younger brother had tagged along. Oh goodness. A party. I just love those!

I’d only managed to get about four hours of sleep the night before, however, and thus, despite my desire to enjoy the company of my long-lost family, I was shortly forced to go to bed by my circadian rhythms and my concerned mother.

I remembered to take out my contacts. I was rather proud of myself. Since approximately half the herd at the home place has or wears contacts, there are bottles of contact solution all over the place, and nobody’s terribly possessive of any of them, so you just grab the closest one when you happen to be in need of contact solution. Which is exactly what I did. I didn’t really look at the bottle that closely, because all of the bottles, historically, have been the same stuff…normal saline solution that you can use as eye drops or contact solution or spider drowner, as the case may be.

Well, unbeknownst to my not-quite-coherent self, this bottle was…different. I didn’t find that out until the next morning, when I put my left contact in and experienced an odd burning sensation unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in the past (or hope to experience in the future). That was possibly the fastest I’ve ever removed a contact.

I thought to myself that I must have somehow still had shampoo on my hands from showering, or something, so I washed my hands veeeery thoroughly, and splashed some water into the eye to try to stop the burning, and waited for the little fellow to calm down and chill out…which he eventually did.

Michelle came in to stand beside me at the bathroom sink right about then, and instantly noticed my dilemma. She explained to me that that particular bottle of solution was peroxide-based and acidic, and thus, contacts must be thoroughly rinsed in regular solution prior to insertion. Um, thanks. I appreciate that tidbit. You have no idea how much.

So the second time, being one of those individuals who attempts to learn from previous errors, I rinsed the contact in regular solution…and put it in.

Ok, so it didn’t burn as bad…but it still burned. Quite a bit. So that contact just went into the garbage, and I opened a new set.

The eye, however, was irritated and watering for the rest of the day. Michelle had a bridal shower that morning, as I stated, however, and I had been asked to MC, so there was really nothing for it, I thought, but to just suck it up and go and pretend the eye would recover if I ignored it long enough (I am told that this is classic nurse thinking, for those of you who may have been wondering).

It was a lovely shower, and we had a lot of fun eating, and singing, and crying, and laughing, and watching Michelle and Joel open gifts, and for me, it was an opportunity to meet people that I’d not seen in over two years, which was special.

By the end of the shower, it was early afternoon, and the eye had gotten progressively worse to the point where I could only squint out of it. It had been watering away like an Artesian dribbler all morning, and by one o’clock, it had swollen almost completely shut and wasn’t overly comfortable.

My Dad is a wonderful, merciful, compassionate man, and thus it was that when he came to the shower towards the end to help with clean up, or whatever (I confess I was a little out of it by this point), he decided that he and I should just go home.

I thought maybe if I took a nap, the eye would miraculously get better. So I took a nap. And when I woke up, the eye was swollen completely shut and I could hardly see anything out of the other one either. Fail.

And so we decided that perhaps, we should have someone medically trained take a look at it. The only thing open that night was the emergency room, so…we went to the ER.

I was holding a washcloth over one eye, and the woman behind the desk looked at me with concern. “What do you have in that eye?” she asked. The look on her face suggested to me that she was expecting to see a knife protruding from the globe of my eye when I removed the washcloth. I was oh-so-tempted to say something like “well, my little nephew and I were fighting with forks at the dinner table…” but sometimes, you realize that the situation is just not appropriate. So I told her it was a chemical burn, and Dad showed her the bottle of contact solution, which he had brought along for show-and-tell.

After a lovely visit with my dad in the waiting room, a man in beautiful blue scrubs ushered me to a sterile-looking back room and asked me to please sit in the funny looking chair in the middle. He was a third-year resident named Ken Ugalali, or something like that…I think perhaps he was Kenyan. Whatever he was, he was certainly quite amusing to me that night. He towered above me, topping off at about 6’6”. Looking down with his black face full of deep concern, he asked what I had gotten in my eye. I told him the story, and handed him the bottle of contact solution.

He turned it over and over in his huge hands, reading the list of active ingredients.

“Number one in comfort,” he read slowly, reading the label on the front. He looked towards me. “Well, not for YOU,” he noted matter-of-factly. I cracked up.

Another doctor burst through the door at that point. He needed supplies from our room, and, while apologizing for his intrusion, he headed towards the medicine cabinet on the back wall to get what he needed.

“Oh, it’s quite alright,” I said, “We welcome any and all visitors. Thank you so much for stopping in!” He looked a little bit confused, and then he kinda laughed, and said he’d never heard that before.

Ken Ugalali wanted to examine my eye, so he had me sit opposite one of those big ophthalmoscopic machines like you find at an eye examination place. He sat on the other side of it, and tried to figure out how to turn it on.

I confess, I was very much amused by the process. He flipped a few switches, and then smacked it with his hand.

“Aw,” he grumbled, “it never works for me. And then the other guys come in, and it turns right on!” He smacked it again with his palm, and then started fiddling nervously with a bunch of knobs whose function he clearly didn’t quite understand.

“Maybe if you flip that switch right there?” I offered. He flipped it, and a few others, and eventually a light went on.

“Good job!” I said. “It’s working.” He grinned proudly, and nodded, and if he’d been a fellow-nursing student, I would have high-fived him. This medicine stuff is so much more complicated than people realize, you see.

He needed to look at my eye, but the eye was swollen shut. This posed a problem, one which he was unsure of how to fix. He took a very long q-tip, and poked at my eyelid, trying to get it to stay open. Not so much working. (I really wanted to suggest to him that we just use a toothpick to prop it open, but I was afraid he might not understand that I was joking).

Finally, looking very uncomfortable, he decided to just use his thumb to hold the eye open. I was laughing really hard on the inside by this point.

After completing his examination, he went to get his senior doctor to verify his findings (I actually am not sure if he found anything…but he gets props for doing the examination in my book).

The senior doctor came breezing in and did the same examination all over again. The look on Ken’s face was precious when the senior doctor reached out without hesitation to hold the eye open with his thumb. That time I laughed out loud.

Eventually, they reached the conclusion that I had a chemical burn of the cornea, and after irrigating the eye with two liters of saline solution, they decided that I could go home.

I was completely soaked at that point, because the saline had all kind of run down the back of my neck rather than running out into the little tray that they put under my head. It was really cold that night, snowing outside, and I was wearing about five layers, so I decided to just take some of them off before I put on my coat.

The attending nurse was ok when I pulled off the hoodie and said I didn’t need to be wearing a soaked sweater. Then I decided I didn’t need to be wearing a soaked shirt, either, so I whipped it off.

His face registered shock. “How many layers do you have ON?” he asked. I just laughed, and said probably more than the average person, cuz I’m still not used to Wisconsin frigidity. He left shaking his head. He’ll recover. And so did I. So thankful for the fact that corneas mend themselves rather rapidly.