Eye Ulcers

I woke up with excruciating pain in my right eye.

“It looks red,” my wife Katie told me. “Is it pink eye?

“I don’t think so.” No goop was gooping. My eye was more painful than itchy.

“Do you think I’m dying?” I asked Katie.

She rolled her eyes at me. I always think I’m dying.

The next day, I was at my eye doctor. He looked me over. Well, he looked my eyeball over. With his eyeball. Eyeballs.

“What is it, doc?” I asked. “Give it to me straight.”

He didn’t think I was dying. No, it was worse than that.

“You have an eye ulcer,” the doctor said. What a grim prognosis.

Can you imagine a more rancid phrase? I threw up in my mouth. Then I threw up on my eye doctor. Then I threw up enough throw-up to fill the world.

***

I didn’t actually throw enough throw-up to fill the world. In fact, I didn’t hurl chunks at all. I remember that, when I was a child in the 80’s, the phrase “hurling chunks” was all the rage. It was funny to me when I was a kid. The phrase isn’t as funny to me now. Nothing is. The passing of time works against laughter. It also works against our eyeballs.

“What,” I said with shock, “is an eye ulcer?”

“It’s like a golf divot in your eye.”

I threw up again. Only I didn’t.

“Oh,” I said. “Great.”

“I see them all the time. You wear contacts, right?”

“Since I was thirteen.”

“Well, you’re not thirteen anymore.”

Tell me about it, doc.

“Your eyes, like the rest of you, get dryer as you get older,” my eye doctor continued. Each word another sling and arrow of outrageous fortune.

“Can you heal me?” Can you make me moist again?

“The ulcer is right on your pupil. It’s a good thing you came in right away, otherwise you might have lost your vision.”

Yikes!

The doctor prescribed me some eye drops. He told me to come back in a week and we’d talk about switching from the monthly contacts I’ve worn since I was thirteen to daily contacts. I left with a limping eye, a sagging soul, and more unavoidable proof that I wasn’t, in fact, thirteen anymore.

***

Not that I want to be thirteen forever. Thirteen was hard. And, I suppose in some ways, I’m still my thirteen year-old-self. My twenty-three and thirty-three year-old self as well. The passage of time is funny. And who is to say that time is linear? Einstein argued the passage of time is subjective. So maybe I’m still thirteen. And twenty-three and thirty-three and seventy-nine? I’m less sure of anything as I age. Less sure of everything. Eyeballs included.

Philosophy aside, my eye hurt like all get out last week. The drops cleaned up the infection. The divot went away. I can still see. And now I wear daily contacts.

I figured, kind reader, that if I have to know the rancid definition of the phrase eye ulcer, you ought to as well. An eye ulcer is a divot in your eyeball. Let’s use it in a sentence to really drive the lesson home:

“Sam, as his something-of-a-breakdown is subsiding, learned that the excruciating pain in his eye occurred because he is losing his moistness in his forties and developed a divot in his eyeball which is known as an eye ulcer.”

Isn’t that great, kids, we all learned something today: