How a Corneal Abrasion Alters One Woman's Perspective

Yesterday morning, when I woke up, I noticed that my right eye hurt. I went to the bathroom, turned on the light and winced. It felt like someone had stabbed me right in the eye. I looked in the mirror. My eyelid was swollen, my eye was bloodshot and tearing, and it felt like it was giving birth. I'd been in this spot before. I had a corneal abrasion.

I sent a family member to the store to get eye patches. While I waited for the patches, I cooked breakfast with one hand over my eye. Afterwards I positioned a flesh tone self-stick eye patch over my light sensitive eye.

The flesh tone color of the eye patch just happened to be my skin tone. This gave the effect that I had been born a cyclops. I was a left-eyed cyclops, but a cyclops all the same.

My mother, who has Alzheimer's, kept asking, "Why's that patch on your eye?"

"I scratched my cornea, Mom." I'd tell her.

"You look weird." She'd say.

"I can draw an eye on it if you'd like."

"Noooo! That would SCARE ME!" My mother has taken to punctuating her sentences by screaming the last two words. It startles everyone in the household, including the dog.

My husband looked at me. "Hey, Patch." he said and grinned a slightly lopsided smile.

"Hey, Poopy." I said back.

"Don't call me Poopy!" He mimicked a line from The Devil's Rejects.

Now, one thing the brain does when its used to interpreting sight through two eyes, is fill in the blanks when one eye is incapacitated. I focused on seeing with my left eye, cocking my head to the right to help. When I relaxed focus, my brain would give my right eye the job of seeing, and it would, for a few seconds. Then the image would start to look like it was sinking under water. The surface of the water would reflect an oil sheen, which then would start to swirl as if raindrops were falling onto it. The image would start moving to its anticipated position, while fading out and being replaced with the white static of an off air TV station. In order to stop this effect, I would have to put my hand over my right eye, touching it to shut out the surreal vision and turn on the real vision. Each touch would compound the pain of the corneal abrasion.

Later, my husband drove us out to my oldest son's house. I was okay on the 30 mile trip there. It was daylight and I could see, sort of. The trip home was a horse of a different color. My vision would drop out, right when a car coming towards us, would be ready to pass us. The sole focus on seeing only out of my left eye, did not work. In the pitch black dark of the country roads, I could not tell when my vision switched from my working eye to my hallucinating eye.

And hallucinate, it did! Panicked deer ran into the path of my husband's speeding vehicle. Unsuspecting humans walked haphazardly into the speeding trajectory of my husband's newly morphed NASCAR racer. With each incident, I grabbed the "Oh shit!" bar above my right side, blindly stubbing my fingers on the windows or roof and gasping loudly in horror. It was the longest 30 miles I'd ever ridden in my life. My husband agreed.

Back in the safety of my own home, I got ready for bed and while everyone else drifted into pleasant dreams, I, in my adrenaline pumped state, browsed the internet on my laptop, getting up twice to help my mother in the bathroom. I glanced at the clock at 3:00 a.m., shocked at the passage of time. I logged off and arranged my bedding on the loveseat in the living room, my sleeping space until the upstairs bedroom renovation was completed.

I settled into my short sheeted sleeping space, only to hear my mother getting up, yet again, to go to the bathroom. I got back up and followed her. When I opened the door, she looked up, then down at the floor, under the shower seat, where she had just thrown her protective underwear.

I followed her gaze, bent down and scooped up the underwear. As I tossed them into the trash, she asked, "Are they throw-aways?"

"Yes, Mom." I then pointed to the spare pair on the shower seat. "Do you know what these are for?" I asked.

She looked up at me from her seated position on the toilet, confused, and shrugged her shoulders.

"They're clean underwear. If you take off your underwear, because they're wet, you have to put on new ones." I started putting a spare pair of underwear on the shower seat each night, after walking through pee trails from her bedroom to the bathroom two mornings in a row.

"Do I wet my underwear?" she asked.

"Sometimes."

"Well, I guess we'll have to DO IT!" she emphasized.

She put her clean underwear on, washed her hands, and went back to bed. I snuggled into my limited space and fell asleep. At 7:30 a.m., I woke and walked to the bathroom. I glanced into my mother's room to check on her. She was not there.

"Oh shit! Did she wander off?" I flooded with adrenaline and my right eye started completing for equal time with my left eye, making my real vision drop out. "How can I search for her one-eyed?" I thought.

I took a few more steps and saw her rotund body in bed with my father. "Oh no. What's going on?" I thought. They've had separate bedrooms for years.

My father has terminal cancer on his brainstem. He is under Hospice care. I wondered if my mother had experienced some kind of psychic premonition to lie next to my father one more time before he died. My system flooded with more adrenaline, canceled out my morning breath and replaced it with the taste of copper pennies. I walked past his room, not wanting to know. I went to the bathroom. I laid back down on the loveseat, waiting.

Soon I heard stirring. I got back up to find my mother in the bathroom. I helped her and tried to send her back to her own bed.

"Aren't you sleeping in my bed?" she asked.

"No, Mom. I'm sleeping on the loveseat."

"Well, why am I in Dad's bed?" she asked.

"I don't know, but let's get you back to your bed."

"But aren't' you sleeping there?"

It was too early for all the questions. "I'm sleeping on the loveseat." I said, again.

I guided her to her bed, only to find that it had slid off the two supporting slats of the frame, onto the floor. She climbed into it, anyway. I made a mental note to buy new slats and have them screwed to the frame. This is the second time in two days that the bed has collapsed.

I left my mother's bedroom intent on checking to see if my father's chest was rising and falling with the breath of a deep sleep. As I stepped into the hallway, I spotted my father on his way to the bathroom. "Mom's bed collapsed last night," he said. "It shook the whole house and woke me out of a dead sleep. I steered her into my bed."

Ahhhh! Mystery solved. Now if I could only see!