In Preparation for an evening
football match I had been wearing my
contact lenses for a couple of hours at work and my eyes were beginning to feel a little tired. The
air conditioning in the building was on and had sucked all the moisture from the
atmosphere, plus I had been staring at a
computer screen and forgetting to
blink (as one does). So the lenses were naturally a little dry and uncomfortable. It was then that I made the mistake of giving my weary eyes a good rub.
Suddenly the vision in my right eye didn't seem quite so peachy anymore. My lense had gone! Shit. I checked the surface in front of me. It wasn't there. Scoured the terrain of my sweater; nope. Gotta be clinging to the back of my hand then, I thought. No such luck. Where the hell was it? Then it dawned on me. It must have 'gone commando' up under my eyelid.
I ran to the communal work toilets and stood in front of the mirror stretching my eyelid to near breaking point, peering underneath it, trying to locate the lense among all the angry red flesh. Was that the edge of it just poking out of the far corner of my eye? Yes it was. Now if I can just - 'blink' - shit, its gone. Its disappeared. Its disappeared around the back of my eye. Okay, Don't panic I tell myself. Close your eyes and pop your ears and it should centre itself onto the iris. I do it - Nothing. I do it again - Nothing, and my ears hurt . Okay, so maybe if I look really far to my left It might just be retrievable still. So I look as far to the left as is humanly possible (this hurts also). But now I can't actually see if the lense is there or not as I'm staring hard at my nose. So I poke my fingers around at roughly the point where I think it could be. Ouch. This isn't going to work. My contact lense really is Missing in action. It's probably working its way around the back of my eye right now, attaching itself to my optic nerve. This can't be healthy. Will my body reject it as a foreign object? Is it harbouring airborne bacteria that will eventually rot my eye and probably half my face? Is it still going to be living inside my socket thirty years from now, when I'm nearly sixty?
After a few minutes of fruitless poking I calmed down and went back to my desk and resigned myself to the fact that I was going to have a bad football match due to a lack of bi-focal coordination and general awareness. Anyway, I told myself, my optician would probably have some sort of sucking device that would salvage it. Needless to say, minutes later, just when I had forgotten about the whole thing, I blinked and felt it appear. Blinked again and it was back in place, good as new.
Later I talked to some other cyborgs about this. They seemed to have had similar experiences. Apparently the little b@*!ds always comes back eventually. One detail to note - when/if you get your first contact lense fitting by the optician they will never mention the possibility of it developing a will of its own and exploring your optical cavity.