First Contact

As I rapidly approach – *gasp!* – thirty, it appears I’ve been going through some sort of premature midlife crisis. I’ve been aggressively travelling to new countries (three this Summer), flirting with various new hobbies and pursuits, will soon embark to improve on my shameful attempt at a juice fast…and, recently, I got contact lenses.

“What?!”, I hear you ask with surprise. “I didn’t even know you wore glasses!”

Indeed; the glasses were in themselves a recent addition. My eyesight was never a problem until I began the Tinbergen masters programme three years ago, which precipitated a remarkably rapid decline in my vision. I decided that the best way to deal with the problem of not being able to read the lecture board was not, in fact, wearing my new glasses, but simply avoiding lectures. It worked, to an extent, but eventually nature took its course and I became one step closer to my Brainy Smurf avatar.

Right before Sabina and I left for Portugal, I got myself measured for contact lenses, and took my trial pair along with me for the holiday. For those of you who don’t know anything about lenses (as I didn’t), here’s a brief synopsis. They are, literally, tiny, malleable lenses that one must stick to the front of one’s eyeballs. It takes a little getting used to, this process; keeping one’s eye open while a finger literally pokes the eyeball isn’t exactly an innate action. Moreover, the wearer is strictly instructed by the optician that hygiene is a must; lenses must be thoroughly sanitised (definitely NOT with any water) both before and after each wear. I was told not to have them in for more than four hours a day at the beginning, so that my eyes could get used to the product. This was good advice: in the early days for a new wearer, it literally feels like a couple of sand granules are permanently stuck in your eye. Uh-uh – no scratching.

This sensation is supposed to go away after a week or so. I say ‘supposedly’, however, because I didn’t get that far. I had the lenses in while I drove our rental car from Galicia (awesome) to Famalicão (less so), but my right eye was becoming more and more irritated, and I became my own windscreen-wiper as I regularly brushed the tears out of the optical culprit. Eventually, I couldn’t take it any more, so we pulled over in a small town so I could take the lenses out.

Into a cafe bathroom, and – pop! – out slides the left contact. Now for the right miscreant…and, what do you know? He’s not there.

At first, I thought that I just couldn’t see it, so I kept trying to pinch the translucent lens on my iris – which, in reality, just meant that I kept pinching my iris. Try it some time; it’s really not fun. After a while, and checking all around my eyeball, I came to the conclusion that the little bugger was missing.

Well, there goes my lens trial for Portugal, I thought, and off we drove again (reequipped with my regular classes). My eye was still in some pain, but I concluded that when the lens fell out, it must have scratched my cornea in the process (I was warned that the edges of lenses can become rough, which can severely irritate your eye. The fun never ends!). I hoped the eye would repair itself in a day or two, but the sand-in-the-eye feeling persisted.

We  were actually in Famalicão for a small chess tournament, so the eye condition played havoc with my preparations. During the first two games, I found it hard to focus in general, let alone on the board, and spent most of my thinking time with my eyes closed. But the worst was in the evenings, when I simply couldn’t sleep due to the constant irritation of my closed eyelids on my damaged eyeball.

(Grossed out? There’s not much more, so read on – but, I warn you, it’s going to get worse before it gets better.)

Finally, by the third night, I couldn’t take it any more. I got up from the bed, went to the bathroom mirror and stretched my eyelids apart as much as I dared. In the very innermost corner of my eye, surrounded with masses of tiny, irritated red arteries, I spotted the glint of something blue. A tiny speck, but the colour gave it away as foreign. Prising my eyelids open with both hands, I carefully tried to drag it out using the fingernail of my pinkie. It threatened to retreat back beyond my eyeball’s visible curvature into the unknown abyss behind my eye, but, after some painstakingly delicate manoeuvring, it began to move centrally. However, I soon noticed that the speck wasn’t coming alone – in fact, it was more of a small piece. No, wait – is it a shard? Eventually, enough became exposed that I could grip it and pull, and out, covered in creamy, sticky eyeball fluid, came my lost contact lens. The whole thing.

Needless to say, it was all glasses-wearing on the holiday after that.

Today, I recounted my story to the opticians. They were (to my relief, I must admit) suitably shocked and appalled. A freak occurrence, they said. Nevertheless, they’ve given me another trial pack to try. (Interestingly, they offered no advice on how to prevent this from happening again. Lightning doesn’t strike twice, after all. Oh, actually…)

Perhaps this was a sign that I should just accept my ageing gracefully, baldness, glasses and all, rather than risking my sight. Besides, they say the eyes are the windows to the soul. And what’s a window without glass?