A happy ending

Someone told me that your eyes heal faster than any other part of your body, and I'm thinking she's right. The doctor today told me that my eye is about 80% healed, and my vision is already at 20/25 in that eye, which is much better than Wednesday when my left eye couldn't read any of the lines on the near vision chart with my reading glasses!

The doctor took the contact lens out of my eye, and when the numbing drops wore off about an hour later, it once again felt like I had something in it, but it wasn't anything like the pain I had on Wednesday. I have to remind myself that there is nothing in my eye, and rubbing it won't help.

The worst part was that the ER nurse was a little overzealous with the dilating drops she put in my eye before I went to the ophthalmologist office. My eye was still dilated today, which made light exposure painful. I spent all of yesterday in my bedroom with the shades down, and I put on sunglasses when I went into the dining room, because it's very bright in there.

As someone said in a comment on my last post, it's a good thing I didn't talk myself out of going to the ER. Even after they'd flushed my eye with an entire liter of fluid, they weren't content until they'd checked the pH of my eye to be sure it was back to normal -- in other words, they checked the pH to make sure there was no lye left in there. That's not something I could have done -- would have thought to do -- at home. And having the contact lens in my eye for the last two days made the whole thing a lot less painful. It really did work like a band-aid on my eyeball.

I'm glad that other soapmakers and future soapers have seen my last post. Hopefully, you'll remember it and will always use eye protection when you get anywhere near lye. Mike and I went out to the barn today where I was making soap when all of this happened, and we both had a whole new respect for the lye. As you can imagine, I left quite a mess out there, because I just dropped everything and ran when the lye got into my eye. But my vision is way more important than a few extra minutes of clean-up later.