i just got back from Lab (pronounced LAHB), Slovakia where the CEL championships were held. CEL stands for Central European League and, of course, the championships were for ultimate frisbee.
we won it all. another notch in our belt. so, at the end of our season, more or less, we have won most everything we've done. an excellent showing overall.
but i thought i'd tell you a different story -
on friday, since i didn't work i decided to try out my last pair of daily contact lenses. if you recall, my left eye is bad and is why i need glasses at all. my right eye is okay. i've been trying contact lenses for a few weeks, but not really last week when i was busy in front of the computer most days. since i'm near-sighted in my left eye, it's not really a good idea for me to wear contacts that help with seeing a greater distance if i'm just going to be sitting in front of a computer.
and, if you also recall, the previous times i've tried them, the right eye has never adjusted to them properly and has, instead, just been plain uncomfortable. non-stop blinking, watering, itchy contact eyes. it's not that my eye was dry. it's that it felt like the contact was slip-sliding around. not comfortable, irritating and a little awkward.
but friday, i tried out my last pair, hoping that maybe they'd be better.
alas, i put them in and the right eye was not good yet again. so i decided that, after meeting my friends for lunch, i would head for the optometrist's again. i didn't want to take them out, in case the optometrist wanted to do something about them.
i went and he checked them out. he said they were fine. i said that no, indeed, they were not fine. he said, okay.
after checking them out a bit, he let me take them out. we moved rooms to a room with a chair and a mirror for me to look in.
i had some issues getting the right out initially. so i worked on removing the left one. no problem. the left came out okay.
i went back to the right. it was really beginning to bother me. he helped me and he pulled out...
half of a contact lense.
he looked for the other half. nothing. we went to the diagnostic room again, he looked in the eye very closely. nothing. he flushed the eye with a lot of solution. nothing. he couldn't find it. it felt a little weird, but maybe my eye was just recovering from the contact. or maybe the other half had fallen out. so we agreed that maybe i should forget about it and come back in two hours if i still felt it was in there.
i went to a music store to browse the overpriced cds and listen on the listening station to some of the newer titles. after about 20 minutes, i began to feel that yes, indeed, there was still something in my eye. the other half was in there. i was fairly certain of it.
so i went back to the optometrist. again, the optometrist could not find anything. i knew, though, that it hurt quite a bit to look up. it felt like maybe the piece of the contact remaining was going to slide around behind my eyeball. the idea was frightening.
so, after repeating the motions of before expect with closer inspection, he said there probably wasn't anything there but i should probably go to the emergency eye doctor at the closest hospital.
so i did that. i hopped on the metro and walked to the hospital. the map outside the building indicating where the emergency optical room was was horribly outdated. because when i walked into the hospital area - it's a huge hospital composed of many buildings, by the way - there was another map indicating a completely different building housed the emergency optical area.
so i found my way there. at first there were professional signs for the room. and as i progressed deeper into the building they degraded - at first from printed cardboard to printed paper to handwritten on paper with an arrow to nothing (more or less). no door was clearly labelled as the emergency optical room. the arrow, however, pointed to a room with two doors.
it was awkward, for sure. which door do i choose? it would've been kinda funny if my hadn't been growing increasingly agitated and painful.
i loitered for about ten minutes, going back and forth between the signs and the two doors, trying to make sense out of my limited knowledge of czech.
eventually, somebody opened one of the doors and i asked if it was the emergency optical room. she said yes. i said excellent, i think i have 50% of a contact lense in my eye. (i still don't know how to say "half".)
she then proceeded to rattle off many questions in czech. i said, eeeheheheh?! sorry, i speak a little czech. she asked again as a man in a coat walked in the room.
i figured out that she was asking if i had been there before, to which i replied no.
the guy interrupted in english and asked what was wrong. i told him that i thought i had half of a contact in my eye still. he took me to another room, put some dye in my eye which colored the lense and removed half of a contact lense.
i did have something in the eye. so i wasn't wrong. considering how my eye was feeling and that i had been feeling excruciatingly tired - i wanted to close my eyes for a LLLOOONNNGGG time SOOOO badly... (i almost called my friend who lived nearby to see if i could crash at his place for a few hours, because i didn't want to deal with making my way all the way back out to my place.)
i thanked him, he said no problem and i left. no paperwork, no money involved. in the U.S. it probably would've cost me about $150 (not including the x-rays of my skull and the catscan) and taken about 83 1/2 hours. i've made the mistake in spain before and now i realize, european medical practices are more efficient and faster (and occasionally more blunt and hence more painful) than the U.S. hallelujah.
and after that, my eye recovered quickly and i was not tired at all. whaddayaknow.
p.s. "cocky" (pronounced CHOACH-kee) means both lenses and lentils - just a fun fact for ya'll who made it all the way through that story.
Posted by iain at September 18, 2005 10:44 PM