The Adventures of
David
Elizabeth
and Leif

I met the doctor (Dr. K) at Emory Hospital Doctors’ Building this morning. He showed up on an off day with his 5-year-old-ish son. He was really nice, and it hit home to me that he was really concerned about my eye if he wanted to come in on a day when the office was all locked up to check my eyeball.

The verdict so far is good: “[Dr. X] got a lot of white stuff out. You’re having a cellular response on your cornea. There’s no growth on your culture so far. We’re not out of the woods yet.”

TRANSLATION: There’s no sign of significant infection on my cornea, although the doc was still talking about my “potential infection”. The cultures of the “white stuff” haven’t grown, although they normally allow 24 hours before they make a verdict. The “cellular response” is some basic swelling of my cornea from the injury plus my body sending cells to repair and fight infection. Things are looking up and Dr. K is not saying scary things like yesterday, but there’s still some possibility for infection to present itself.

I am really thankful for the prayers and phonecalls from everyone!

OK, I didn’t learn my lesson that well. When I got the snowball in the eye I said I’d always just go to the doctor asap when it comes to eyes, no matter what. So what did I do when I got the thorns in the eye? Nothing. Actually I picked thorns out from my eyelids and eyebrows with tweezers, and Elizabeth got a couple too. But yesterday my eye was pretty uncomfortable and light-sensitive. It was getting redder and worse all day. At about 3 pm I decided to go to the doctor. It was too late … the best I could do was get an appointment for today.

This morning I showed up at 10:40 at the Emory Eye Clinic. I finally saw the main doctor around noon. He spent a rather long time looking through the slit-lamp at my eye. (That’s the machine where they shine really bright white or violet light onto your eye from the side and look at you straight on.) He kept saying, “Mm.” Or “Look up… Mm.” Then he’d write something down. He asked his assistant for a “Point 2 and a point 3…no just a point 3.” The point 3 was a 0.3 mm tweezer to rip off the scabs from my eyelids to check for more thorn-fragments … ouch!

But the real reason why he kept saying “Mm,” was “You have a thorn in your cornea.”

What? That clear part of my eye that I look through has a thorn imbedded in it?

I tried to get a lot of info out of the doc, but he was pretty concerned about the situation and didn’t give me much:

Me - “What are the vision implications of this?”
Him - “There are possibly some implications… it doesn’t go all the way through your cornea. We’ll have to take a stain.”
Me - “What’s a stain?”
[... lots of ADD-type activity where the doc was going out of the room and using medi-speak with his peers ...]
Doc - “You need to go to Dr. X at the main Emory campus. She’ll dig out the thorn and take a stain and a culture.”
My brain - [to itself] “Did he just say she’s going to “dig” a thorn out of my eye?”
My mouth - [to the doc] “Is there some kind of infection?”
Doc - “If it’s bacterial, we can just treat it with antibiotics. But it might be fungal.”
Me - “What if it’s fungal?”.
Doc - “Go to the Emory hospital, 4th floor, Dr. X is expecting you. She’ll dig it out.”
My brain - “He said dig again!”
Doc continues - “There’s an O.R. there just in case. Do not stop for lunch. Go now.”
Me - “Not even for McDonalds drive through?”
Doc - “No, just go now.”
My Brain - “Dude, this sounds really bad.”
My Brain again - “Dude, did he say O.R.?”

As I was thinking about this, I had to stop to pay the copay. It took about as long as a McDonald’s drive-through. That’s why he didn’t want me to stop for lunch. I had to buy his lunch! Seriously, though, the Doc was nice but harried and hurried and concerned, a fact that concerned me!

They gave me a copy of my “chart” and I drove to Emory without stopping for lunch.

Dr. X was really nice. She explained in much more detail that I had a scratch and a “foreign body” in my cornea, not too deep (the chart said something like “FB 40%”) and she was going to scrape off the outer layers of my cornea and try and get the white stuff out (which I imagine must be ocular pus) and see if it’s bacterial or fungal. She was going to try to remove the foreign body too.

With that, she put some numbing drops in and put this really maddening thing on my eye that kept me from being able to blink. She muttered something about “gravy for the brain…” (watch the movie Conspiracy Theory for the reference).

Anyway, it was pretty uncomfortable to watch her use this small-blade-of-the-pocketknife thingy to scrape my cornea. She took some of the “white stuff” from my eye and put it in peitree dishes. Then she scraped some more and said, “Now I’m going to try to get the foreign body out…” She got another tool that looked a little like a straightpin and started prying against something buried in my cornea. A couple times she moved my eye sideways with her prying force before the pin made a very small popping noise and came loose! After about 5 tries, she finally got it. “I have removed a brown foreign body from your cornea,” she said with her northern-Germany accent.

It was not fun.

The best part was when she took off the eye-keeper-open-er off my eye.

I’m taking antibiotic drops every hour and going back tomorrow to see the first Doc.

The good news is that the thorn and subsequent corneal scraping were way down at the bottom of my cornea, out of my field of view, and there should be no vision implications. Unless, I guess, they can’t kill the potential mushroom growing in my cornea!

One of my earliest memories is of my Dad showing me a lunar eclipse through the living room windows in our house in Mendham, NJ. The most recent eclipse reminded me of this. Here’s a sequence of views:

As the eclipse approached totality, you could really see how red the shadow of the earth is.

The sun can just be seen starting to brighten the other side of the moon.

No the blue light is not the "lunar corona" … it’s chromatic distortion in my relatively cheap lens.

I had a great mountain bike ride today. Not as great as the one where Pop and a vine got into a disagreement …

No, in this ride, I was cruising down a dirt road I’d just discovered in what may be one of the coolest mountain-biking places I’ve found … except for the mud and garbage dumps and thorn branches. I was looking down to try to negotiate round a puddle in the road I when I felt a small branch hit my helmet. Then it slid down over my eyes … or should I say it ripped down through my eyebrow, eyelid, eyeball and face. I could feel the thorns breaking off and tearing my skin. Thank God for the reflex to close eye when it’s threatened, and for the way the eyeball is recessed construction of the face. It really protects the seeing part. I hit the brakes and almost said something like "!@%#!!!!". I was pretty scared because I could feel something in my eye and thought it was a thorn embedded in my eyeball, and when I put my hand up to my face it was bloody. My vision was a bit cloudy too. I was about 2 miles from the car with two dogs to get back too.

Warning: Gross pictures below!!

I called Elizabeth to ask for prayer and let her know that I might need a ride home or to the hospital, depending on how things developed. Then I started walking back towards the car. Partway there, I found a really wide, easy, downhill road that I knew would be a shortcut. I decided to ride it. Then I took another shortcut I’d “coincidentally” found about 10 minutes earlier that saved about 20+ minutes of extra riding including the fording of a river and riding down a really bumpy railroad grade. Thank God for that coincidence!

As I rode I started thinking that the thorns might just be embedded in my eyelid. My vision was close to normal, but there was definitely something "in" my eye. I made it to the car and could see a bunch of thorns in my flesh, and one right on the edge of my lower eyelid. It was really uncomfortable, but I couldn’t pull it out without tweezers. I decided I could drive 20 minutes home. Here’s what I looked like when I got there.

If you look at the right side of my lower eyelid you can see a dark spot. That is the end of the thorn embedded into my eyelid.

Here are the thorns I was able to remove (Elizabeth removed some more later). The one on the right was in my lower eyelid, rubbing against my eye and generally stinging.

I guess I should start wearing goggles when I ride or get in snowball fights!