I woke up at dawn with the light streaming into my eyes. It was a perfect morning.
I didn’t notice, though.
I was in a rush — as we all seem to be nearly every day of our lives — already running late.
I showered and tossed in my contacts, just as I had done for the last 30 years. My eyes stung a little.
I thought I’d gotten soap in my eyes, so I splashed in some eye drops and went about my day.
A couple of hours later, as I was waiting to get my hair cut, my eyes began to water.
Allergies.
I was annoyed there was a longer line than usual. You know how days like this go: Hours are like dominoes. When one falls, the rest of the day collapses quickly.
I sat, knocking out emails on my cell and posting on social media.
By the time my barber draped the cape over me, my eyes stung.
As he cut my hair, the world around me looked as if it were on fire and filled with smoke.
Finally, my eyes felt as they were being fed to an army of fire ants.
I could barely see.
My husband, Gary, who had been waiting for me, rushed me to the car. I removed my contacts and handed them to him.
“They’re gone,” he said. “It’s like they disintegrated in your eyes.”
We were close to home and sped back, friends in the medical field providing advice via text.
I rinsed my eyes under the faucet.
“It’s getting worse,” I told Gary.
And that’s when he saw it: A bottle of facial toner — which looked similar to my contact solution — was sitting on the bathroom counter.
I had soaked my contacts overnight in acid, witch hazel and alcohol.
I had blinded myself.
A nurse friend told us I might only have a certain amount of time for treatment.
Gary rushed me to the closest emergency room and dropped me off at the door. I tripped over the curb and fell into the ER. I was helped to my feet, and someone handed me a set of forms to complete.
The scene was simultaneously heartbreaking and sadly laughable, much like I might write in one of my novels.
By this time, my eyes were swollen shut, and I had to force them open — for seconds at a time as the pain was so intense — to detect silhouettes.
The ER was jammed.
I heard Gary explaining what had happened, and that I only had a matter of time.
Somehow, his advocacy got me into a room, where I waited and waited. I could hear the chaos around me.
A nurse came in and told me to look at an eye chart. It took myself, Gary and the nurse to force one eye open at time.
“What do you see?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
I couldn’t see a letter, much less a chart or a nurse. Only a pinhole of light.
I was given numbing drops, which helped only briefly.
The ER was in consultation with an ophthalmologist remotely. They had to rule out my corneas weren’t torn before they could examine and flush them thoroughly.
I was screaming in pain.
Another nurse stopped by to check on me and informed me that the cornea has more pain receptors per square inch than anywhere else in the body, and more than 50% of the sensory receptors in the human body are located in the eye.
Hours passed. I sat on my knees with my head pressed tightly against the wall to ease the pain.
On occasion, I would force my eyes to open to ensure there was still a dot of light.
They gave me some pain medication, and I began to drift.
As I did, I remembered my grandma, Viola Shipman, whose moniker I now use as a pen name to honor the working poor Ozarks seamstress whose sacrifices changed my family’s life and whose lessons inspire my fiction.
At the end of an exhausting day of work, my grandma loved nothing more than sitting on the front porch of her tiny home and watching the sun set.
“Look at that light,” she used to tell me. “It’s the little things in life that matter most, the simple things we all take for granted every day. Life is but a blink of your eye. It goes so quickly.”
I could hear the voice of my mother, a lifelong nurse, who worked as both an ER charge nurse and hospice nurse.
“Nearly every person facing a medical emergency, or at the end of his life, is filled with regret,” she told me. “I beg you not to be filled with regret. For some reason, it always takes a crisis to make us appreciate what we have.”
Those two women are the reason I followed my dreams to become a writer.
But had I ever followed the wisdom of their advice?
Finally, my eyes were flushed, and I was released, although my eyes were still swollen shut and there was no guarantee my vision would be fully restored.
On the way out of the hospital, the aide pushing my wheelchair said, “I know you can’t see me, but know I’m pulling for you.”
I started to cry.
“I just feel so stupid. I caused all of this myself. By being tired, rushed, always in a hurry.”
“We’re all human,” she said. “That’s the beauty and horror of being alive. But some of us lucky souls get a second chance to see the light.”
Slowly, my eyes healed … and opened.
I am blessed there is no long-term damage to my vision. The eyes, thankfully, have an amazing capacity to heal.
Ironically, for the longest time, I was sensitive to light.
But for the past few months, I have woken at dawn and broken at twilight to watch the sun rise and set. I have tried to slow the insane pace of life to listen to the birds, sit on my screened porch, walk on the lakeshore, hike in the woods and spend time in the garden and with those I love.
Do I still fail sometimes to be in the moment?
Of course.
But I have remembered not to live with regret, and, sadly, it did take a crisis to remind me how blessed I am — to be a writer, to be healthy, to be so loved.
Indeed, it is the simple things that matter most, like the way light illuminates the face of my husband at the end of a day, or the way it crosses the photos of my mom and grandma that I have on my writing desk.
Mostly, I have remembered that life is but a blink of your eye, and each blink is a screen capture of what matters most.