EYEHEARTZOMBIES

I’m going to the doctor tomorrow (May 6th). I’m not sick or anything, no return of Sir Horks-a-lot. I’ve just been having my headaches more frequently and worse than usual. Now that we have insurance, it’s time to get them checked out and fixed if possible.

Backstory would be good, huh? Several years ago (when I was 17), I wore contacts. This was my second try at contacts. My first had been a few years before that and had been the hard kind of contacts, which are just a bitch to deal with. These new ones were soft and pretty easy to wear, remove, and clean. They were disposables, even, so cleaning wasn’t a real concern.

That’ll raise an eyebrow or two among those of you who know how important cleaning your contacts are. I was young, inexperienced, and I just listened to my eye doctor. Yes, that’s right, my eye doctor. He told me that it was fine to wear one pair of contacts for a week, remove them at the end and throw them away, sleep for one night without the lenses in, and put in a new pair the next morning. Lather, rinse, repeat.

So I did. I’d put contacts in on Sunday morning, wear them until Saturday night, throw ‘em away, and sleep until morning, when I’d put in a new pair. I still remember the shivery-but-enjoyable feeling of slipping in a contact. It’s hard to describe, but it’s very unique. I did this for a few months, maybe six.

Then I started getting horrible pains in my right eye. Light-sensitive is an understatement. My eye would turn red and I wouldn’t be able to get my eye open very well. The eye teared up and I couldn’t do anything until the pain passed.

They started light and got worse. I didn’t have many of them before it became apparent something had to be done. One day I got one kind of early on and didn’t go anywhere that day. I remember the day because it was about three days before Warped Tour, 1999. I lay on the couch with a pillow over my head, listening to the television. My mom was worried, as any mother would be, and tried calling the eye doctor.

He wasn’t in. In fact, he was away somewhere on vacation. So my mom started looking for other eye doctors. The first one she tried was out for the day, but she explained what was going on to the assistant/nurse/whatever. She listened and said she’d call the doctor and see what he recommended. He was out on the lake, if I remember correctly, but said he’d come in right away to see me. Apparently it was as urgent as we thought.

We get dressed and head to doctor’s office. Sit in the waiting room while we fill out the various forms and answer questions and wait for him to make it in. Forms are filled out, he’s in, and now he’s checking out my eyes. We were just barely able to get the contacts out earlier that morning, so I’ve been blind this whole time. After some lights, some wall chart reading, some air puffs, and some other fun experiements, he’s figured out what’s wrong.

Contacts, at least the one’s I was wearing, are not meant to be worn for extended periods of time. A day, two days at most. Not a week, in other words. Why? Well, contacts are made of plastic. Plastic that doesn’t let air through very easily. No air means no oxygen. No oxygen means the body starts looking for it in other places. Hey! All that moisture in your body has oxygen in it! Let’s pull that in to the eye.

Excessive moisture in any part of your body works just like having too much water in a tree or concrete or mud. It starts to rot and fall apart. My right eye was extremely over-saturated.

Yes, I know how nasty having the words “rot” and “eye” in the same paragraph is. Yes, I know the nasty images that brings into your mind.

As a result of all the water in my eye, my cornea was beginning to slough off. It would have eventually fallen off, leaving me blind in one or both eyes.

So, thanks to my eye doctor, whose job is to HELP my eyes, I could have ended up blind.

The new doctor told me that I shouldn’t ever wear contacts again, as there’s a good chance they would ruin my eyes quicker than they were this time. He got a new prescription for me and even rushed the order so I’d be able to see when I got to Warped Tour.

So, that’s the backstory. Since then I occasionally get headaches. They’re always on the right side of my head and especially painful in my right eye. Feels like a finger or ice pick stuck all the way through. Pain in the back of my head, too. They’re not really light- or sound-sensitive, but sometimes they are. Sometimes they last for hours, sometimes for minutes. I take sinus headache medicine when they start. Sometimes that stops them, sometimes it doesn’t.

They’ve been getting worse lately, though. Seems like I have them almost every day. I haven’t had one yet today (knock on wood) but I had a horrible one yesterday that lasted for 6 hours or so and beat three Tylenol and two sinus-headache pills. Elaine has been wanting me to go see a doctor about them for awhile now and we can afford to go now, so I guess I’m going. I’ll let you guys know if it’s something horrid!

Update

Alright, so it was a quick doctor’s visit. After blood pressure, temperature, weight, pulse, breathing, eye-following-light, nose-touching, and a few other default tests, the doctor has pretty much ruled out sinuses/allergies.

Migraines, in their best form, only come once or twice a year. When they’re as common as they are for me, they’re obviously not in their best form. When they’re like this, you take preventative medicine. That is, of course, assuming you don’t have some sort of tumor or something.

To make sure on the tumor part, he thinks I should get a CT Scan (a CAT Scan), but he doesn’t think it’s required. Just a good idea. He also gave me some medicine samples to try and treat them as best we could. To treat migraines, you deal with two parts of your body. Blood pressure and nerve irritation. Both are available as constant treatment (drugs you take every day), or as abortive treatment (drugs you take when you feel the headache coming on).

For the next month or so (with or without the CAT scan), I’ll be taking Maxalt as an abortive and Lexapro as a preventative. So I guess we’ll see how it works. Hopefully these things get under control so I can stop missing half of the week due to pain.

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