Monday Morning Panic

How do you like to wake up? To music? To the smell of breakfast cooking? To a warm shower? Or, how about to excrutiating pain that you inflict upon yourself?

It started last night. I had something in my eye and ended up taking my contact out. After that problem was solved, I just took the other contact out and wore my glasses for the evening.

This morning, I put a contact in my right eye first. When I put my left contact in, pain beyond belief ensued. It felt as though acid was burning the cornea right off my eyeball. Frantically, I start grabbing at my contact to pull it out of my burning eye. But, water is flowing from my tear ducts trying to cleanse my eye of the posionous substance attacking by body which makes grabbing the contact difficult. Finally, I pull the contact out. The burning continues. I cup my hands and fill them with cold water as I immerse my eyeball into the water and frantically blink to combat the stinging.

Slowly, it gets better. As I lean into the mirror to check out my eye, fearing that I have gone blind, I am happy that I can indeed see that my eye is beet-red. I realize that it will be a glasses-wearing day and then wonder what happened to the contact that I frantically pulled out of my eye. I search for it and find it hanging on the edge of the counter.

We have two types of contact solution: Clear Care and OptiFree. The Clear Care is what we use on an everyday basis. It comes with a special case that has a piece of metal inside. The metal reacts with the solution (which is almost purely Hydrogen Perioxide) to create bubbles that clean your contacts during the night. Warning labels are all over the bottle in bright red. "DO NOT PUT CLEAR CARE DIRECTLY INTO YOUR EYE!" You must leave the Clear Care solution in the special case with your contacts for at least 6 hours so that the Perioxide neutralizes into water after reacting with the metal. So, we have the OptiFree in those cases when we don't have 6 hours to wait, or we need to clean a contact and put it right back in.

Last night, when I was dealing with the fuzz in my eye, Hubs put the OptiFree into the plain, everday case along with my contact. After I decided to just take out the other contact and wear my glasses, I grapped the Clear Care (not thinking at all) and put it in the other side of the regular, everyday case. Therefore, this morning I put a contact drenched in pure Hydrogen Perioxide directly in my eye. Thus, the burning of my eyeball. It makes me cry just thinking about it.

I don't recommend trying this at home.