Graphic and somewhat disgusting post alert.
For those of y’all who aren’t on my twitter feed…yesterday I was all, “Hey, my eye’s been irritated for awhile, I wonder what’s going on?” My white long-ish haired cat sometimes sheds these urticating hairs that can really bother my eyes. It’d been going on for about two weeks.
So I’m in my bathroom, looking at my eyeball, trying to find a piece of cat hair, when I see this thing on my eye. I touch it, thinking, hooray, I’ll finally be rid of that “there’s something in my eye feeling”…and it moves. It…slides.
Now, this will dial in my age for some of you — when I was growing up my babysitters had just gotten HBO. Back when HBO stood for “Has Beastmaster Only” — line courtesy of Nick Mamatas, that I’ve never forgotten because it was fucking true. There were two movies on HBO. Beastmaster — and Poltergeist. I saw both of them at least 40 times.
If you’ve seen Poltergeist, you know. The part where the researcher is in the bathroom, looking in the mirror pulling shreds of his face off?
Oh, I go there. In my head. I’m all, “Hey what if it’s a piece of plastic? Should I pull it out?” and then I realize it’s fucking eye-tissue, and ZOMG NO. NO NO NO. I wonder if my decade old lasik has gone bad, and my eye’s got a weak spot, and what if I pulled and that thing tore across my cornea? AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
I freaked out for a bit, in the bathroom and online, and made an appointment for the eye MD today. All last night I’m all “Don’t rub your eye. You will slide eye meat off.” And nothing makes you more freaked out about vague irritation that you almost can ignore than knowing that it is loose eye skin!
AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
So today at the doctor I’m telling him my story and he’s looking in there. It turns out it isn’t entirely loose skin. I have a blister on my sclera. How did it get there? Who knows. When will it go away? No clue. I’m all squicking out, and he knows where I work, and he’s all, “Really? Because that’s more gross than this.” And I’m all, “No. This is on my eyeball. My eyeball.”
He explained how it happened, in theory, because your eye is covered with skin cells, which is something that I did know from work. We get in Stevens-Johnsons Syndrome people at work sometimes, and protocol is to get an optometrist to see them and start co-managing their care, stat. SJS is caused by systemic allergic reactions to certain medications in particular, and it can be gnarly. Depending on how bad it gets, you slough off all your skin, inside and out. Skin’s anything that touches air — GI tract, lungs, eyeballs. Even if it doesn’t seem like they’re skin-like, they’re still all epithelial tissue.
(If you want a super fun time to be all, “Hey, I wonder what it’s like where Cassie works,” you can google SJS pictures, although looking through at them, I realize that none of the shots there are very graphic at all. They’re realistic for smaller cases, but there’s no systemic pictures, heh.)
Anyhow. My eye still feels weird, but there’s nothing I can do about it but wait it out. And let him know if I get more. Which I don’t intend on doing, heh. No more blisters on my freaking eyeball for me.
(The title of this post is a shout-out to Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace…an episode of which I now realize is actually pretty graphic, in a humorous ultra-early-80’s way. Consider yourself warned, if you follow the link ;).)