Emergency

So last night was one of the most unusual nights of my life.

First off, I went to a party. While that is a little out of the ordinary for me, it's not what I'm referring to.

At said party, I was accidentally poked in the eye.

Now, allow me to digress for a moment. The bloke who did the poking (name withheld to protect the innocent) is not somebody I'd ever really talked to, or even been around for a lengthy period of time, before. However, I knew him (or at least of him) well enough to think I wouldn't like him if I did know him, meaning I was holding a bit of a grudge against somebody I didn't really know at all. I kept telling myself that this was wrong, I should give him the benefit of the doubt because it's not like he's ever wronged me in any way. I consider this sufficient ammo.

But back to my eye. As I've mentioned fleetingly in the past, I wear contacts. Have for my entire life. So getting poked in the eye is, well, not something I want to have happen. Not even accidentally. There are three possibilities for what could happen:

1) Everything would be fine (unlikely, and I knew right away this wasn't the case).

2) The lens would flip out of my eye and land either just above my cheekbone or on the floor.

3) The lens would move off my pupil but remain in my eye.

Past experience has taught me that #3 is the most likely, and that's certainly what it felt like - my eye didn't feel how it normally does when the lens is out. Plus I hadn't noticed it falling out.

I ducked into a washroom and looked around my eyeball a bit, stretching eyelids hither and thither. No luck. (Didn't help that my eyes were very, very, very red by this point - an unfortunate side effect of my consuming even the least bit of alcohol. Especially if it's late.)

I recruited a friend to come into the washroom and help me out, the logic being that if I were to open my top eyelid and look down, she could see what was above my pupil whereas I'd be only able to see my pupil, were I looking in a mirror. Ditto for the bottom. She didn't see anything.

Nonetheless, the feeling convinced me that it was still in my eye, and not wanting to make a bigger deal out of my dilemma than necessary, I decided I could deal with it once I got home.

I got home around 2. Got ready for bed for some reason (optimism, I guess), then went back to trying to find the missing lens. Thought I found it, and tried to nudge it back to centre (which now worries me a little bit - considering the eventual conclusion, what was I doing?).

No luck, and I lost track of whatever I'd been looking at.

Scrambling for ideas, I knocked on Dan's bedroom door. Luckily he was smart enough to figure out that if I was waking him up at 2:30 AM, there was probably a very good reason (or maybe because I was knocking and not entering, he just couldn't throw a shoe at me). Despite his uneasiness about all things related to contact lenses, he was willing to look around my eye and tell me he couldn't see anything either.

Then he drove me to the hospital.

I'd heard horror stories about Brantford General Hospital from quite a few people - and good stories from precisely nobody - so this was really a last resort. But nothing else was open, and I really didn't want to fall asleep while I still thought there was a contact lens drifting around my eyeball.

We got there about 3:00, and after some brief questioning, I was told that there was only one doctor in, so it would probably be a three-hour wait. This didn't bother me too much - I was expecting far worse, and I probably had the least severe situation of anyone who showed up in the ER all night.

Nonetheless, three hours meant that I couldn't really expect Dan to stay with me, so I sent him home. Although I did ask him if he'd mind coming back with some supplies to get me through the night - remember, I didn't want to fall asleep - and he was happy to oblige. Around 3:45, Dan returned with a bag full of far more than I'd asked for. What was in that bag?

There was the book I wanted. There was another book that Dan threw in because he thought the first one sounded boring. There was an MP3 player (in case I wanted to walk home, since it was fairly warm out and wasn't *that* far a walk). Finally, there was my jug of saline solution - according to the Internet, if I lied down and basically drowned my eye in the stuff, there was a chance the lens would float to the top. It didn't.

Dan went back home (this time to get some sleep), and I prepared for a three-hour-or-so wait - I know they'd said 6:00, but I'd heard that there'd be three doctors coming in at 7:00, so I reasoned that I might not be seen until then.

The book, and occasionally trying the saline thing again, helped pass the time. Around 5:00, I succumbed to hunger and bought a Snickers from a vending machine.

By 6:00, I was getting tired. I'd stopped reading, and started leaning back, head on a wall, figuring there's no way I'd be able to sleep with a wall as a pillow. I was wrong, because when I was called to the back five minutes later, it shook me out of a half-sleep.

I was led to the back, and to a patient room. It was clear I was supposed to be in this specific room - I've spent enough of my life around optometrists and opthamologists to know an ocular machine when I see one. This one looked like all it could do was take a detailed look at an eye, which made sense both as all a hospital would have and as something useful for this case. (Having by this point been awake for approximately 21 hours, there was also the chance I was mistaken.)

The bad news was that I was sitting on a bed - a hospital bed. Not particularly comfortable, but I knew if I laid down for even a moment, I'd be out like a light. The good news was that I didn't have to listen for my name anymore, so I could make use of that MP3 player to kill time (one of the first songs, amusingly enough - REM's 'Daysleeper').

Doctors and nurses started showing up for work, clearly a lot of shifts began at 7. For a time, I felt like I was in an episode of Scrubs - hearing all the chitchat and such; my limited knowledge of the hospital layout led me to conclude that I was closer to their workspaces than most emergency patients would get.

It was at this point that I reached a conclusion (which I may or may not have stolen from a TV show, I'm really not sure) - if doctors are talking about a patient amongst themselves, and there's even the slightest chance of the patient overhearing, they should refer to them by their middle name, eliminating the possibility for spoilers. They're bad enough for movies.

After waiting for what was starting to seem like an obscenely long time, I took off the MP3 player. I'm not sure what I was planning on doing next; sleep was starting to seem like a definite possibility. About ten seconds later, a doctor came in.

He had a look around my eye, said there was no way the lens was in there, but on the plus side there wasn't any cornea damage from the initial incident either, so I could just put in my spare lens and all should be fine.

I left the hospital a little annoyed at wasting five hours of prime sleeping time over nothing, but with a sense of gladness that this was Canada and the whole thing only cost me the $1.25 I deposited into a vending machine. I called my awesome roommate and politely told him that I was going to walk to Tim Horton's (because I was hungry) but I'd like him to meet me there and drive me home (because it was raining). He did.

I went home, ate my Bagel BELT (those things are good - move over Egg McMuffin, I have a new unhealthy breakfast sandwich to eat once in a blue moon), and went to bed. It was 8:45 AM.

Woke up about five hours later, meaning I should be able to fall asleep not too far past my normal time tonight. Also early enough that I can actually do some of the schoolwork I was originally planning to today. I'll get on that.

--Ryan