I spent all day crying. Sitting here, on this spot, tears pouring from my face onto the desk. At about 1:30pm I said “Person, you gotta go to an emergency room.”

I woke up with a thing in my eye. It felt like dirt, or an eyelash, or any of the other residues planted on my eyeballery in the past. The thing woke me at 7am. Thinking little of it I shut my eyes intending to resume my much-needed nightly 10 hours of sleep. This routine bit of laziness was impossible. The thing under my eyelid scratched like static on shortwave radio, like a needle on an unpliant LP record, like the grating noise of the Mr. Softee Truck jingle.

Thinking I just needed to flush out my eyeball I went to Walgreen’s for some eyeball juice, but the dude hauling out the garbage at that hour proudly told me to come back at 8am. I didn’t bother explaining myself, showing him my tomato-red right eyeball, or leaving him a tip. He was busy. So I went to a 24-hour Supermarket and got some Visine (it was the only eye product they had) and I gorged on that stuff, practically pouring it into my orbital cavity, imagining instant relief as the specks of detritus were summarily vanquished.

No such luck. Nothing doing. Visine made no difference to the scratchithy-scratch inside my eyelid, but it did “get the red out” and in the process dried my eyeball, making the scratching on my cornea by this foreign object all the more painful.

I tried pouring water on it, I tried nudging and scraping it with my bare finger, I tried holding my precious eyeball up to the water roaring from the showerhead (I couldn’t do it). I went to Rite-Aid and bought some “artificial tears” stuff that I imagined would make me weep, would make me purge what felt increasingly like shattered glass shards from my eye. Rite-Aid’s “Artificial Tears” did nothing. I went to another place, a pharmacy across the way from the aforementioned 24-hour grocery store, and asked if they had “Eye Wash. You know, the stuff with the cup.” “Yes,” was the answer from the guy who begaspedly looked at me like my eye spewed lava.

Eye Wash (with the cup) works like a shot glass for your eyeball. You pour the clear liquid into an ergonomically-designed plastic cup and hold the cup to your eye, holding it tight as swimming goggles to avoid spillage, and then you turn your head back, Jameson-style. With the liquid poured over your eyeball your swirl your wide-open orb every which way, drowning it in the fluids which should raise the foreign particles up from the eye.

I did this Collyrium Eye Wash shotglass to the eyeball 4 or 5 times, but it only made things worse. After the Collyrium Eye Wash the scratching became ridiculous. I started to sweat and become short of breath, my eye turned a maroon bloat of bloodshot. That’s when I announced to myself, dude, wake up, nothing is working, you don’t know what you are doing, you gotta go to a fuckin’ emergency room. Or something.

I called my PCP regular doctor but got his answering service (why do these services exist except to tell you the doctor’s hours? Who gets paid to man these useless answering services?). I learned that his hours resumed at 2pm. I called at 2:01 but got his damn “service” again, so I just went over there and groggily announced that I needed to see the guy right away, “I didn’t call”, “Please”, and I was told I could take a seat. The other patients in the waiting room must have thought I was terribly sad and depressed because my eye was just gushing with fluid. I seriously considered the possibility that the cornea was being slashed and sliced by this impregnable foreign object.

The PCP took one look at my face and said “Whoa!” and announced that I needed to see an eye doctor. Yes, of course, I guess I knew that, but in my incoherence I imagined that I just needed a helping hand to spray a hose of saltwater on my eyeball to glory this thing out. He picked up the phone and said “He needs to see an eye doctor, right away.” I told him all the stuff I had already tried and he said I needed a specialist with the right gear. He was right, of course. Had I not been nearly blinded and increasingly anxiety-stoked for 7 hours I might have had the wherewithal to find an eye doctor in the neighborhood, but I doubt I would have had the presence of mind or good luck to know which type of eye doctor to choose.

20 minutes of paperwork later I was sent across the street to a retinal specialist. Across the street. That was handy. I imagined they would send me far away, to Staten Island, Westchester, or Toronto. In anticipation of such a journey, and in anticipation of unannounced barrier-to-entry expenses associated with entering the American health care system (even though I have “insurance”) I snarfed $500 cash at the ATM on my way over. I could barely see or find the number pad to enter the freakin’ PIN.

I made it to the retinal surgeon place. After another 20 minutes of paperwork and standing around my eyes were plunked with numbing agents and the pupils dilated. I told them about my other retinal specialist (how many retinal specialists do my eyes’ balls need, anyway?), about my macular degeneration (which is mostly stabilized) but that was for naught, irrelevant. That had nothing to do with this dagger jammed in my eye. In response to lawyerly questions I made illusory reference to my parents. “They’re both gone,” I said, laying my right hand flat in the air. “I don’t know anything about their medical histories.” My right eye belched forth fluids. The pain was amazing. If I closed my eyes for 1 second I involuntarily pulled both hands to the sides of my head and gasped.

I stared into the familiar glow of the retinal specialist’s gear. I see it once a year, and shall see it yearly for the rest of my life. Dots and wavy things. White hot mirrors. Donkey Kong and Asteroids. My head hurt. Oh, God, my head hurt from self-treating my eyeball all day. I was sent to “the first room” where the surgeon/specialist appeared, a most amiable guy (much unlike the strictly-business dude I see for macular degeneration checkups). He turned up my right eyelid and, after a few minutes, spotted the intruder. He said it looked like a fleck of plastic, and that he could see the scratches on my cornea from me blinking on it. “Who knows where that thing came from, right?” he asked, rhetorically. I thought the object was on the bottom eyelid! That was how it felt. I was wrong. It was on the top eyelid. He wielded a teeny-tiny pair of tweezers on my upturned eyelid and plucked the shard of plastic. I did not feel a difference immediately, what with the numbing agents, but I had no reason to doubt his confidence that he had found the foreign particle. He saved the object for me, sticking it on the tip of a cotton swab and putting it in a baggie. I said “Bravo, doctor,” and he chuckled, as any virtuoso would. He went back to double-check, remarking again on the scratches to the cornea, then dunking my eye with a drop of Vigamox and handing me a free bottle of the evidently very expensive eyeball antioxidant. Once the numbing agents wore off he said I would feel pain again, but nothing like before, and as I type these blurry words through still partly-dilated pupils I find that he is correct. When I sleep tonight he said the eye would heal.

I walked the mile or so journey back to this spot, my dilated pupils aching under the bright sunlight. I shielded my eyes from the sun like an anonymous “See No Evil” caricature. I felt vulnerable.