The Pencil in the Eye Is Mightier Than the Sword

The infamous pencil.

In middle of September, I got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. I was staying at a friend's house and was unfamiliar with the layout of the place in the dark. I ran into a tray with a lamp and a pencil cup. I tripped and imbedded the pencil shown on the right in my left eye. My head slammed into the tray and I acquired lovely bruises. I was rushed to the emergency room because my injury wouldn't stop bleeding and I was worried I would lose my eyesight.

The pencil to left is the one that broke off in my eyeball. I've included my original injury pics, along with some pics as it is healing. 

It was point down and unsharpened, but it still caused a lot of damage. I honestly don't know how I fell that hard. It looked like someone invisible pushed me. 

At the emergency room.

Getting stabbed in the eye fucking hurts like Satan's poker is spitting your eyeball in hell. No amount of pain killers makes this okay. I had about eight stitches. I was in the ER for 13 hours. I have had many follow-up visits because I have ongoing headaches, double vision, nausea, and an infection that took three antibiotics to heal. A few months later and I still suffer from double vision, headaches, and nausea. I have a cyst underneath my lower eyelid I am having removed right before Christmas. Yes, I can definitely use this horrific experience in my own horror stories. No, I don't recommend stabbing yourself in the eye with a pencil.

More bruised leg pics.

Healing slowly

My bruised leg.

Eye exam chair.

Pretty gnarly healing.

Scary pencil injury facts you didn't know.

Have you injured your eye? Did it hurt like a motherf? Tell me in the comments. Share your pain.

Eyeball Injury Leads to Lack of Writing

I lived up to my oddball reputation yet again this weekend and it has cost me a whole weekend of writing, including finishing my Jack Frost story I blogged about last week. Ugh! I'm blogging on painkillers and squinting out of one eye, so please bear with me. Being the incredibly multitalented human being that I am I managed to scratch my right cornea and tear my sclera, the white part of my eye, causing fluid to buildup underneath and giving my eyeball the appearance of a wrinkled apple for the past few days. Lovely! All this because I rubbed my eye when I was sleepy. I spent late Friday night in the ER and was sent home with an eye ointment that completely impedes my vision and vicodin, which completely impairs my judgment, but has given me a lot of great writing ideas to draw from when I can finally focus. The vicodin has also brought out the insomniac in me and so here I am blogging out of one eye at 1AM on Sunday night.

Before I was seen by the ER doc, I had to sign all these consent forms and I freaked out quietly to myself when asked to sign a form consenting to electronic records. In my painful state, I wasn't thinking clearly and my writer's imagination raced to Philip K. Dick and William Gibson cyberpunk stories with visions of tiny nanotech robots boring into my brain and transmitting data to the government. Then I flashed to an article I had read about microchips being implanted in humans now with all their medical data -- all very Big Brother 1984 and scary! Of course, I quickly realized she was talking about emailing my doctors, which was a great relief.

Then I had a lot of time to think while I waited and stared at the fancy light they used to check your eye for scratches and all the other medical equipment labeled in cupboards. It was a full ER and I was prepared to wait until Charon's pups grew up to see anyone since I wasn't having a heart attack or a baby or bleeding to death or suffocating. The irony struck me that I had recently blogged about Katherine Vaz's short story collection, Fado. My favorite was The Journey of the Eyeball, a wonderful magical realist story about the journey of a young man's eyeball detached from his body and seeking his lover. I tried to picture my eye wandering down the sterile hospital corridors plastered with generic modern art prints, its optic nerve dangling like jellyfish tentacles as it bounced along. The soundtrack for the entire scene was Phish's The Mango Song, part of the chorus playing over and over in my head, "Your hands and feet are mangos. You're gonna be a genius anyway..." I don't know why I cast this song for my music video, except that it's a happy tune and at that point, I thought my eye would be quite happy bobbing away from its accident-prone owner.

I went home with my eyeball intact, though not very happy. And as far I as can tell, though I haven't seen a doctor for a recheck, my eye is going to be just fine, even though I managed to lose a weekend of writing and will probably do something equally as stupid in the future at some point. After all, you're speaking of the same girl who slammed her own foot in a car door in high school. It's a good thing I work with a keyboard and not any sharp instruments on a daily basis!

As always, happy writing and happy reading to all!