Sunday Scare

On Sunday afternoon, Sean was in the kitchen starting to wash our lunch dishes. I was in the sitting room (which is a family room back in North America), getting ready to put a fresh coat of clear nail polish on my finger nails.

I had done my right hand first and then went to move on to the left hand. I had the bottle of nail polish in my left hand and the brush in my right hand. I was leaning toward the table to put the bottle down, when it slipped out of my hand.

I looked down to grab it and at the same time, it had landed the right side up on the floor. However, with the lid not being on it and the force of the hit to the ground caused a huge glob of it to go flying straight up and out of the bottle. I was looking down at the time to grab it and that huge glob of clear nail polish landed straight into my left eye.

I screamed.

At first, since he wasn’t in the room, Sean thought that a gecko or a “flying snake” (as I like to call them) had scared me. But then my scream was getting more horrifying and constant. He thought I was electrocuting myself (there’s a reason he thought that – another story for maybe another day – but it wasn’t me).

He came running into the room and saw me bent over in pain, my hand covering my eye. “Oh my gosh! What happened?”

“I GOT NAIL POLISH IN MY EYE!!!”

And like everyone else who has heard this story, the first question was, “What? How did you get nail polish IN YOUR EYE?” (Read above again for the answer!).

Sean led me to the floor and had me lay down. I tried to open my eye and all I could see at first was black. I burst into tears thinking I was blind.

Sean ran and got water and tried to get me to open my eye. It was excruciatingly painful; the burning/stinging sensation was overwhelming. All I could do was cry.

Finally, we got my eye open and I was no longer seeing just black (thank you Jesus!) but everything was very fuzzy.  It was like the nail polish had coated my eye ball (which it probably had).

And so Sean began flushing my eye out with water. The white of my eye was as a red as a Macintosh red apple. I still couldn’t really open my eye; we were forcing it open and my vision was still very blurry.

After about forty-five minutes of flushing my eye out, I started to see a bit clearer. Sean flushed my eye out for another half an hour before I could see clearly.

However, there was still a piece of something in my eye. If I moved my eye to look around or closed my eyes, I could feel it scrapping across my eyeball.  It was not only a nuisance but a painful one at that. I could never quite find it or flush it out. At times it would “disappear” and then it would just show up again if I moved my eyes or blinked (which is A LOT!).

I went to bed on Sunday night with discomfort; my eye had been through a big trauma and it was still really red. I was exhausted and fell to sleep very quickly.

On Monday morning, the alarm went off and I woke up, feeling a bit like a pirate. My left eye was crusted shut. Pretty, isn’t it? And my sweet husband still kissed me good morning. What a blessed woman I am!

So Sean went and got warm water and a q-tip and gently wiped at my eye lashes to remove the crust from them. After about a minute, I could open my eye and I had perfect vision and the piece of whatever that had been in my eye, was gone.

Yay!!!!

It’s now three days later and it’s all good. I can totally see; however, it is still a little sensitive.  I do find myself randomly checking the vision in that eye by covering the other eye and looking out the left eye.

So what have we learned from this experience????

Don’t wear nail polish. J

Much Love,
Meredith