Hey Scott, I know you found it easy getting your lenses in at the optometrist. I mean, you did have a doctor holding half your eyelid back for you. But when you get home it could be another story.
Doing it on your own, the contact lense may get repeatedly stymied by your long lashes and the fact you can’t pull them back properly. Or else your eyelid (now without Doctor assistance) will try to drop at high-speed; sort of like a car window screen wiper being jammed. The result of this is you could spend upwards of half an hour trying to get a lense in. Allow me to repeat: a lense—as in, one lense.
Then comes the second one. By this point you’ll be feeling more confident. This will be a mistake. Not only that, after being slipped through the lush grove of your lashes, and under the quivering hood of you eye—which you are almost yanking off—the contact lense won’t take. Your eye ball is too parched, it seems. This will leave you aghast, a state which gradually reduce to fury, then to childish foot stomping and fist shaking. You’ll drop the lense repeatedly. You’ll scream. The lense will be forced in, only to droop backwards onto your cheek, like a flattened and perfectly circular tear drop.
You’ll think to yourself only you would fail at something so every day. That perhaps you’re biologically incapable of wearing that i.e., the optometrist neglected to add: “Oh, sorry, I forgot to tell you, contact lenses fit human eyes. Not your little lobster beads.” An idea that will give you pause. Tears will run down your oft-poked eyes, which have just received more jabs in a half hour (this is additional to the previous half hour, as in, you will have been in the bathroom for an hour or more) than during its entire viewing life. But it isn’t over yet. You will try one more time. Success! Or at least you think so. You blink repeatedly. By now your eyes will be scratchy and red as all get out. It will be difficult to tell. The light blue tint of them is visible on the outer rim of your cornea. At least you think so. After all the contact is gone; no longer on your finger. You look again. There, in your left eye, is a contact. The right—well, maybe not. No. Maybe?
This will become what could be referred to as your “tantrum”, where-in you’ll tear the bathroom apart searching for your lost lense. It could be anywhere. Those things can stick anywhere; bathroom sink, the floor, the wall, the little grooves and crannies behind the basin; anywhere, it seems, but your eye. They’re light, transparent and malleable. They can practically fold themselves out of existence. Keep in mind that you’re searching with one great eye and one terrible eye—that the two visual words (crummy and spectacular) sort of meld together to make a third, simultaneously blurred and clear world, like watching TV through a rubber blanket.
Time is up. You have to leave. No Scott, you really do need to leave. You have places to be. Peel (quite a nice term for pinching and scraping ones eye) that left lense off and go.
I know I know, it’s frustrating. There are you are, back in your glasses. Today they’ve grown four times larger than they actually are. You are wearing those giant-novelty glasses reserved for teenagers and people who describe themselves with adjectives such as “krayzee”. But look (pun no intended, I assure you) you can just go back to the Optometrist. See? There’s a good boy. Try not to mind the people staring, just don’t giggle too much, since your eyes do make you look like you’re blitzed, baked, glazed, or totally shit-wrecked on pot.
But you will ruin your mystique (or at least your perceived mystique) at the Optometrist. You thought you were somehow, I don’t know, special?-for not being on medication, for not having had a previous eye condition or eye surgery, didn’t you? You were so smug. Now look at you; shuffling in all shoulders up, guffawing as the receptionist hands you your replacement contact lense. You may think she’s laughing at you—I mean, how does someone lose a contact in a day, nay, less than 24 hours?—but really she doesn’t care. She’s seen your type a thousand times before.
You will begin with the eye that gave you so much trouble. You will in fact be getting close. Only something is obstructing the final approach; something more than the lashes and the eyelid and the dry membrane of your eyeball. There, poking out from the innermost corner of your eye ((N.B out of the pink rim, which leads to the Lacrimal sac (i.e. your sinuses)) is an almost clear petal. With two fingers, and with the greatest show of delicacy you’ve shown in hours, you will retrieve your lost contact, which has been jammed behind your eyeball for at least six hours.
Dear Scott, this is the core of my disclaimer, the one which you wished someone, anyone, had told you, and that you’ll be shocked you never heard before, namely; that contacts can be sucked up into the sides, back, top and under of the eyeball.
Perhaps it feels like a waste of time, not telling you till now. Also, to omit your brother actually warning you that such a thing might happen?—that it had happened to him before? Maybe it feels like a ruse, a big wind up so the story’s twist is more rewarding. But really, what would the point of telling you be? You ignored him when he told you; you ignored the possibility when you lost the contact lense; even when its being sunk in the recesses of your eyeball was in fact the most likely thing.
My point is this; that even with this, what amounts to a voluminous and elaborate attempt at a warning, whose very length is an attempt at getting through your thick skull, sort of like a long-arm drill, even after all of this; you will not listen to me. Did not. Though my awareness is running thin here (I’m vastly exceeding my word-count limit) I think you spent forty minutes more trying to fit the contact lenses on your eye. You tried, in fact, till your eyes hurt so much you couldn’t try anymore. I suspect you’re going to try again tomorrow.
All I have to say is—aside from SEEK MEDICAL HELP!—is this. If such a clear cut warning fails to get through to you, then I dread to think what other valuable (and plain obvious) disclaimers you’re not only missing, but deliberately ignoring. I sincerely hope there is no more important thing in life than contact-lense application, since at that you have clearly failed. Or, in the patois of optometry, you may have caused permanent damage to your vision.
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