It was red!- vile!- oozing with liquid!- crusting around the edges!- swelling and stinging simultaneously. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced. It came so suddenly; I had no time to wonder what was happening to me. I knew this was my fate. I, an innocent victim, thrown into the depths of ultimate turmoil, had pink eye.
It hurt a lot.
On Monday morning, I noticed that my right eye was beginning to tear up for no reason. I figured that I must have gotten something in my eye, and it was reacting with a bit of natural healing. It didn't bother me too much at first, but my eye continued to cry through the rest of the day. It was becoming noticeable, and I felt uncomfortable having tears spontaneously leak out of my eye mid-class. I also had work that night, and let me tell you: it's not fun being teased (even playfully) about crying because of the "stress" of my first job.
Later that night when I was laying in bed attempting to fall asleep, I began to have a painful headache. The pain seemed to be coming from the right side of my head, in front of my ear. I noticed that the area was painful to touch, so I turned over on to my left side and eventually fell asleep.
I woke up several times during the night to find crust around my right eye. They were like "sleepies" on steroids, clumping around my tear duct and circling around the bottom layer of my eye. It was pretty gross, but I wiped the crusties away and fell back asleep. Twice more I awoke in the night and found dried goop around my eye. By now, I knew something was up. These eye/head incidents weren't normal.
When I woke up Tuesday morning, my eye not only had crust around it, but the area was beginning to turn red. Also, the white area of my eye was turning a bit pink, and overall, the whole eye area was incredibly itchy. After only a few minutes of being awake, the uncontrollable tears began to leak out of my right eye. I finished getting ready for school as best I could, and went downstairs to tell my parents about my eye.
They told me that it looked bad, but they wanted to keep monitoring it through the day. I reluctantly agreed to attend school as normal, but my eye began to itch and eventually sting by the end of first period. By the time second and third period rolled around, my eye was becoming puffy, and I had several people ask me what was wrong. It didn't help that I was producing tears in the eye, too, which made it seem as if I was upset.
When it was lunchtime, I knew that I had to do something about the eye. I went home for the lunch period and showed my parents my worsening eye. They agreed that it was looking even worse, and that I more than likely had pink eye. I ate lunch while my mother called the doctor's office and attempted to make an appointment for that afternoon, but all the doctor's offices were on lunch break until 1 P.M. Apparently, even if you are in the process of dying like me (ish) and need an appointment, you're out of luck while the docs catch a bite to eat.
Needless to say, my mother had no such luck getting an appointment while lunch was happening. We waited until 1 o'clock came, and tried call again. Out of the three doctor's offices in town, no one had openings for today. We decided to do the next best thing, which was attend the minute clinic at the local CVS.
It turned out to be a great choice, because we were able to get right in at the minute clinic and saw an extremely friendly nurse. She was able to identify the problem as pink eye right away, and with that, we were off to the pharmacy to fill a prescription for eye-drops. We waited for several minutes as the pharmacists got my medicine ready, and with that, we were heading home to heal my eye.
The eye-drops felt funny at first when I squirted them on my swollen, burning, infectious eye, but I quickly adapted to applying them. I did this every four hours for several days, and eventually, my eye healed completely. Pink eye was a very unpleasant experience, but at least I can say I've survived it!
