A Nail In The Eye

Today, as I was dropping Ben off at the bus stop to go to class, he had a little accident. He has this cross necklace that he never, ever takes off. A while back the cord broke and the only brown cord I could find that would fit through the catch was a stretchy elastic cord. So today, he was brushing the dog hair off his shirt when his ring caught on the cross. As he looked down to see what his ring was caught on, the cross came loose, snapped back on the stretchy elastic cord and hit him right in the eye.

"Ow!" he was laughing as he rubbed his eye and told me what had happened. His eye was watering profusely.

"Are you okay?" I asked. "Let me look."

"No, I'm fine, it just hurt. There's my bus!" He headed off toward the bus as I drove off. I could see him still rubbing his eye.

Four hours later I got a phone call from him. "Mom, can you bring some eye drops when you pick me up? My eye is killing me! My Spanish teacher dismissed class fifteen minutes early because she said she just couldn't look at me any more. I tried to see the school nurse, but she wasn't in her office."

"But you said you were fine! You were laughing!"

"I'm a GUY mom! I'm not going to sit around whining about something hurting. I thought it would stop after a few minutes, but my eye is watering and my nose keeps running and everything is blurry."

Urgent Care Center, here we come.

I picked him up and we headed straight to the UCC. Amazingly, they took us back almost immediately. Ben had a great time talking about what he would do if he lost his eye and had to get a glass eye. "If someone ran into me from behind I could pop it out and act like they hit me hard enough to knock my eye out. At Halloween I could take it out and chase everybody with it!"

That's Ben, always looking at the bright side.

It actually didn't look too bad. His eye wasn't very red although it was watering a good bit. When they tested his vision though, he could see perfectly with his right eye (he read the bottom line of the eye chart) but with his left eye he could only read the third line and even then he missed some of the letters. His vision tested at 20/60.

The doctor came in and examined him thoroughly. I was fully expecting him to tell me that Ben had a light scratch in the corner of his eye. Instead, he drew a picture of an eye and drew two lines across the iris and pupil. "He has two lacerations across the cornea; a long one and a short one." Fortunately they should heal fairly quickly although it may take a few weeks for his vision to return to normal. For now, he has to stay in the dark and not move his eyes around a lot. And I have to squirt ointment in his eye every so often.

The doctor then put something in Ben's eye, turned off the lights, and pulled out a black light. The liquid he had put in Ben's eye glowed brightly. The doctor called in a nurse so that she could see the lacerations in Ben's eye under the black light.

"Oh cool," she said. "It's making the inside of his nose glow too!"