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Thursday, November 01, 2007

Flush


A sure sign that you're getting old is the inability of the body to rebound from a hard night's work. I remember the days when I could get by on almost no sleep, looking and feeling as fresh as ever. But it's become evident that my parts are starting to show signs of age, and the body isn't what it used to be. Now, waking up in the middle of the night to respond to an ER call means I'll pay the price for it in the morning.

This morning it took all I could summon to get my aching body to the bathroom to get ready for work. Although I spent less than an hour in the ER working up a patient, the total time I was awake was about 3 hours from the moment my pager went off to the time I actually fell back asleep. Which meant that although I went to bed around 10 PM, I only got about 4 hours of sleep last night:

  • About 10 minutes talking to the ER doc after my pager goes off
  • 30 minutes spent getting dressed and driving into the ER
  • 45 minutes spent with the patient and doing paperwork
  • 30 minutes spent driving back home and getting in bed
  • 20-30 minutes spent wondering if I missed anything and planning for how to take care of the guy in the morning as I lay in bed wide awake
  • 15 minutes spent staring at the clock and stressing about trying to fall back asleep before finally falling sleep

I walked into the bathroom this morning like a zombie. A very slow moving and discombobulated zombie. It also didn't help that I worked out yesterday, adding muscle aches to sleep deprivation as spontaneous groaning noises escaped from my mouth.

But all that disappeared in a flash as I realized I just flushed my left contact lens down the sink.

Oh, SNAP!

Wow, talk about waking up quick. My heart sank, several expletives shot out my mouth, and I was wide awake howling with misery.

If I wore disposable lenses, that's one thing. But I don't. They're RGPs. And they're frickin expensive. Add to this misery the fact that I haven't been to an optometrist in ages, so I don't have an up-to-date eye prescription. I won't be able to get a replacement pair for weeks. And who knows where I've placed my back up pair.

Misery, misery, misery.

I stared down the drain, but no contact lens there. So I thought I might be lucky and that my contact lens would've gotten stuck in the trap.

Oh please oh please oh please!

But when I opened it up, there was no contact lens. But I did discover lots of nasty slime and gunk which explained why the sink has been draining kind of slow lately. Besides, even if I did find my contact lens, there was no way I was putting that in my eye after it touched that disgusting crap.

So anyway, I luckily found an old pair of contacts after some frantic searching. (Sometimes it's a good thing being a pack rat.) And although its an old lens, I think my left eye is OK. Regardless, it's a good thing I'm right eye dominant.

;)