Surprise Trip to the ER

Today could have gone better. I had a couple of meetings in the morning, ending at 11:30. I ran into one of my friends on the way back to my dorm and stopped to chat with him; we had a positively wonderful conversation swapping stories of the mad chemists we know (one of mine involved 300lbs of mercury in an unregistered home lab and one of his was about a prank involving a weak contact explosive on the underside of a toilet seat with the added benefit that one of its components was iodine, so it stained the unlucky prankee a deep purple).

While swapping said amusing anecdotes, I got something in my eye and tried to rub it out. It didn't come out and when I looked at my eye in the mirror it was kind of yellowish and goopy looking. Not goop on top of the eye...the white part seemed to be gellifying. I was understandably disturbed by this and called my grandfather who is a retired doctor to ask his opinion. He said that I'd scratched it and had some conjunctivitis, basically an infection in my eye; the yellowish stuff was similar to pus, and I needed to go to an optometrist or the ER and have them take out whatever was in there and give me antibiotic eye drops. My roommate, on the other hand (doomed to grow into one of those mad chemists, I'm sure) told me that if they tried to take my eye out I wasn't to let them.

After running the gamut to settle the insurance issues I got in the car to go to the emergency room and spent a lovely part of my day sitting in the waiting room. After I was seen they sent me back with the eye drops Poppy told me they would give me and a suggestion to take some Claritin to keep me from itching it.

All told, I'm back now and my roommate is happy to see that I still have both my eyes. The eye drops they gave me had a sheet in the box describing what's in them including detailed chemical structures. Because we're Mudders, I'm going to show that to my roommate to see what he can say about it.

~KMarsh