Eyeliner Shrapnel

Did your mom ever tell you not to play with sticks because you might poke someone's eye out with one? I'm sure Mommabear told me this once or twice back in the day, but I swear I never remember her replacing the word "sticks" with "eyeliner" ... because that would've been pretty useful yesterday.

#nofilter

I'm honestly not even sure how the above injury occurred. I had finished putting eyeliner on my right eye (the injured eye) and was working on the left when I noticed some red-tinged tears leaking down my face. I surveyed the eye and found nothing that seemed to be causing this, and then lifted up my eyelid for further inspection and spotted a cluster of broken blood vessels. The eyeliner pencil I was using at the time probably needed to be sharpened and was so dull that I must've scratched the eye when I was working on my lash line.

Thinking nothing of the incident because I was in no pain and the red-tinged tears had ceased, I proceeded to tell Mommabear about my scratched eye approximately 20 minutes later during our almost daily phone chat while I commuted to work. 

This was an instantly regrettable decision because I'm pretty certain no one in the world incites panic faster than a mother.  

"If you're leaking pressure, you might go blind ... call your optometrist ... does it hurt ... don't let the fluid all drain out." It took all I had not to hang up on her when she suggested I never wear eyeliner again.

I never should've told Mommabear about the eyeliner shrapnel. My story retelling on the phone was really just a way to catch her up on my life in the 24 hours since we had last chatted, and I had none of the symptoms she was rattling off. My eye went from a stupid injury that hadn't concerned me in the slightest to Defcon 1 in mere seconds. Phantom pains and images of wearing a pirate eyepatch for the remainder of my life danced in my head.

Thankfully, I work with some fine folks that know a few things about injuries, and after a quick look over, I was pronounced a-ok. For 48 hours, I'll have to forego wearing contacts and flush my eye with saline solution every few hours. I'm really glad I won't lose sight in my right eye because it'd be a very lame story. If I ever do lose sight in either eye, I at least want a cool story out of it ... like, "I was in an unfortunate sword fight," or "I was hoeing the backyard and got a little overzealous."

Moral of today's post? Don't play with sticks, even the pretty-colored ones they sell at fancy department stores.