12-21-23
I was home alone and in the living room enjoying my first day off work for the holidays (which is actually today) thinking about how my right eye has been irritating me the past two days due to me rubbing it too hard and slightly bruising the lid. At some point I was spacing out and staring at my mom’s nativity set with its really bright blue LEDs. The lights are really hard to look at. Especially when the lighting pattern gets to the part where they flash rapidly for a few seconds. This time I noticed the lights were particularly hard to look at. I also became aware that the lower part of my eye had been irritating me too, when before it was just the upper eye. I decided to look in my bathroom’s mirror to see if there was anything in my eye bothering it.
I walked to the bathroom and noticed the sun was starting to get low in the sky out of the windows. I turned the bathroom light on and examined my eye in the mirror. Immediately, nothing appeared out of the ordinary. Then, I pulled my upper eyelid up to see if anything was under it and found nothing. Finally, I pulled my lower eyelid down and at once saw a large crescent shaped deformation on the bottom of my eye. I instantly let go and reeled back and nearly stumbled on the toilet. I had no thoughts for a moment. Just pure shock at what had happened to my eye.
Going back to the mirror and pulling the lower eyelid down again, I saw the deformation in more detail.
It looked like the bottom part of my eye had rotted away. The crescent was perfectly centered on the bottom of the eye and went from the front all the way to the back. The arc spanned almost the entire width of the eye, yet the zenith was rather low. This made the deformation unnoticeable to anyone since my eyelid completely covered it up. Lining the edges of the arc was a film of what looked like hardened wax that I somehow knew was desiccated eye whites that was an attempt by the eye to save itself. I thought about going to the doctor immediately but then my parents got home.
I showed my mother and asked (in Spanish) if she knew what this was. Instantly she remarked in a sad tone that she’s seen this before with one of her brothers and that there was nothing that could really be done. The eye had already started to rot away. She said to call the eye doctor tomorrow since they were already closed for the day. I thought of just going to the emergency room but ended up not since the emergency room staff in my town are kind of not good for anything that isn’t a life threatening condition (It’s just really underfunded IRL. The hospital itself was decommissioned years ago). I asked my mother if it would continue to rot off and she said yes. She said that even with the medicine, my uncle’s eye still rotted away until he went blind in that eye and had it replaced with a glass one.
Eventually I just went to bed, but was unable to sleep. The irritation in my eye was too much, especially now that I knew it was caused by something severe. I thought about how the navy will definitely medically separate me and was upset since I had recently made good progress with them. After trying for what felt like hours, I finally fell asleep. Then I woke up (actually woke up).