Entry 7: Eyeballs

Eyeballs – either you can touch them or you can't. For many a year I was unable to do this… I started wearing glasses when I was 10 and over the years have steadily become increasingly blind (sorry, I mean shortsighted). I literally cannot see past the end of my nose, though I hope metaphorically I can see much further than that. In my 20s I attempted several times to wear contact lenses, and failed. Overcoming that completely natural and overwhelmingly strong reaction of stopping anything not only touching my eye, but putting something in it was very difficult for me. Basically, I was one of those people who could not touch an eyeball!

My glasses became like a piece of armour. I hid behind them, knowing (or at least believing in my head) that I was less attractive because of them. If the eyes are a window into the soul then my glasses were a shield hiding my soul away. My glasses were quite a feature of mine, that even after I had stopped wearing them for a good year or so, when an acquaintance designed a graphic avatar for me, he made it with me wearing glasses. When an elderly family relative greeted me at a function after not seeing me for many years, she had no idea who I was. When I told her "I'm your grandniece – it's Helen!" Her reply was "oh, I didn't recognise you; I was looking for your glasses."

Needless to say then, finally conquering the fear of touching my eyeballs and overcoming the involuntary reaction that stopped anything going anywhere near my eyes was a big deal for me. Starting to wear contact lenses meant that I was no longer hiding. My soul was there for all to see, if you looked deep enough into my eyes.

Any person wearing contacts knows that you should never leave them in longer than 8 to 12 hours. You are told that because of germs breeding on the contact lens the risk of infection is great. You run the risk of causing Keratitis (an infection of the cornea that could end up in a cornea transplant; herpes, bacteria and fungus can all cause this (http://www.geteyesmart.org). I was therefore fastidious about washing my hands and making sure I took them out at night. When I had my accident in Chile, they got left in for four straight days. When they finally realised I had contacts in my eyes, they did take them out… And I got my glasses back. I went from being able to see everything, to only being able to see through the little window of lens provided by the frame. Once I returned to Britain I insisted I would start wearing my contacts again, much to the disapproval of my parents. Hospitals are places that germs run riot. And now I would need to have somebody else putting in the contacts and taking them out. If I think about it, this was the very first thing I insisted on doing/achieving when everyone around me was saying it was impossible. It took a while, but after several weeks in the ITU of having to constantly ask somebody to push my glasses back up my nose (at one point we Sellotaped them across the bridge of my nose It got so bad), I insisted that I wore my contact lenses again. The nurses in the unit were fantastic – and they were all for touching eyeballs!

Now I am able to train up every new PA that I have to put in contact lenses and take them out again. However, in the two years I've been out of the unit I think only one of the girls I've worked with actually knew how to use them from wearing them herself. Everybody else simply had to be willing and able to touch my eyeballs! I happen to know that of all the jobs that the PA has to do, dealing with my contact lenses is THE most hated job. As a result, I end up leaving them in. More often than not, they get left in for almost a week… Not wanting to deal with their reluctance and having to brace myself to have the trust in this person to basically put their fingers in my eye.

Yesterday I went to the opticians for a full checkup/MOT of my eyes. I've recently been having trouble seeing my laptop screen, and focusing on text at a distance and also waking up with headaches over my eyes. The optician immediately told me I had an eye infection beginning and I was not to wear my contact lenses for five days. We had fortunately caught it in time. He didn't name it, but perhaps it was Keratitis. I reckon that as this is my first ever eye infection since I started wearing contacts, and certainly the first trouble I've had since, ahem, I've been leaving them in for days at a time that I've been very lucky indeed.