Ow! My Eyes!

 One day not too long ago, I looked in the mirror and there was something weird happening on my left eyelid. I didn't worry too much, because as I have aged, I have discovered that there are many, many weird things that start happening with my body, so I like to have a wait and see approach. 

After a couple of days, the thing looked a bit like a blister, wasn't painful but didn't look right. Then I got a really good look at it with a magnification mirror. Turns out it was an eyelash that decided to grow upwards and into my eyelid instead of outward. What the hell? Why do our bodies do such outlandish things at this age? I have never had anything remotely like that happen to me ever before. 

I half-heartedly attempted to try and pluck it out of the skin with my own tweezers, but the angle was terrible, and I could just picture myself gouging my eyeball out or something. Which is the last thing I need. Asking my husband to do it was nowhere on the option list, he has very large hands, and precision work is NOT his forte. 

So I did what anyone with halfway decent healthcare would do and made an appointment with the first regular doctor that would see me at my big HMO. No need to go go urgent care, no need to wait to see my own primary doctor. Just someone who would look at it and go, yup, I will go ahead and refer you to the  opthalmologist. Because at my big HMO, you cannot just schedule yourself with an opthalmologist. Someone with more knowledge than yourself has to clear you to go first. Whatever, I know how to play the game well at this point. 

I arrive at my appointment and the doctor strolls in. He is a younger doctor, and this is probably where I should have gotten a little nervous. Well, honestly, I did note his slightly brash manner and did have a moment of hesitation. He looked at my eye with a weird magnifying glass and declared that he thought he could get it out himself. Really? I thought to myself that I was very skeptical of this. I did not feel that he was going to be any more successful than myself as I wasn't sure of the tools that he had, and I had read that it was the opthalmologist that had all the right equipment to do this. 

However, thinking that he was not going to write me the referral unless he attempted to do it himself, and knowing that he seemed the type that felt like he was a bit overconfident in his abilities, I allowed him to try. He shouted down the hallway for the assistant to find him some tweezers. I had already swabbed the area with some alcohol myself, which apparently was good enough for him. 

Now, if I had known the type of tweezers that the assistant had found and provided to him, I would have stopped him right there. However, I had already been laid back in the chair, so I had no idea. Have you ever seen Robin Hood Prince of Thieves? Alan Rickman plays the Sherriff of Nottingham, and there is a famous line where he says he will cut some other person's (possibly Robin Hood, it's been a while since I've seen it)  heart out with a spoon. A henchman says, why with a spoon? And Alan says, because it will hurt more. And this, my friends, is what happened with those tweezers. They were the rounded type, not sharp. He kept trying to dig them into my eyelid and dig the eyelash out. Well, it was like using a shovel when you need a precision instrument. There was no way in hell he was going to get it. I could have saved us all the trouble. He kept digging, I kept grunting in pain, he kept asking if it hurt, I kept saying yes, rinse and repeat five times. I have a pretty high pain tolerance, and this shit hurt. Who knew the large amount of pain receptors on the eyelid!

His pride apparently wounded, he finally gave up. My eyelid was now gouged, bleeding, painful, and swollen. But hey, I got my referral!

When I arrived at the opthalmologist about four days later, she used specialized equipment such as a specific type of ocular magnifying instrument so that she could see exactly what she was doing without using her hands to hold it, and a very specific type of tweezer that was extremely sharp, closer to scalpel sharpness than the CVS kind that other guy was using, and she had my eyelash out in less than 2 minutes. It did not hurt one tiny bit. She did cluck in sympathy upon seeing the damage to my eye, but professional courtesy required her to not say anything about it. 

Now, lord save me from young male doctors who should know better but don't in the future. I swear all of my negative encounters have been with mostly younger male doctors. They need to get a grip.