Seeing Clearly

I’m not one who likes to admit I need help. I generally try to tough my way through whatever problem I might be facing. I’m one of those who are reluctant to admit that I might be sick and need to rest. I take a lot of convincing before deciding it’s worthwhile to go to the doctor. 

This frustrates Elizabeth. She’s never quite sure if she can trust my account of how I’m feeling. She looks at me suspiciously whenever I say, “Everything’s fine.” I think she feels sometimes that she’s being cheated out of opportunities to care for me by my refusal to admit that I’m sick.

This past week hasn’t helped matters. A week and a half ago I hit myself in the head with a prybar. This was not a light tap—it was pulling the prybar into my forehead with all of my strength. I was trying to pry a bicycle hoist off the rafters in the garage and the prybar slipped out, resulting in said collision with my forehead. This explains the gash that appeared over my eye two Sundays ago.

At the time, I was surprised there was not more blood. And after sitting for awhile, the headache subsided and I was able to get back to work. But here’s how the incident unfolded to begin with: when I installed the hoists about ten years ago, I stripped the screws, making it impossible to take them out. I should have started by trying a vice-grip locking pliers on them, but my first thought was to drill through the screws to weaken them. This proved harder than I had hoped as my cordless screwdriver is near the end of its life, and at some point I decided to stop trying to drill and start trying to pry.

I counted myself fortunate that the injury was not more severe, and even took our daughters out that evening on some adventures. Everything was fine, except there was a nagging scratchy feeling on my eyelid. I checked three or four times to see if some sawdust or something else had fallen into my eye, but didn’t find anything. I chalked it up to swelling that must have happened from the impact of the prybar.

Only the scratchiness didn’t subside. And indeed, I woke up on Tuesday morning that next week and my eye was bright red. And super-sensitive to light. And the vision was kinda blurry. And I had a pounding headache. Elizabeth told me to go to the doctor. I said I’d go if things didn’t improve the next day. The next day they were marginally better. I didn’t go to the doctor. Each day since then, they were slightly better—just enough to convince me I didn’t need to go to the doctor. I rested a little more than usual, and looked up concussion symptoms and best treatments.

Finally Tuesday of this week, a week and a half after the initial incident, a doctor came to me. A friend of mine who is an ER doctor stopped by, and I took the opportunity to ask him about my eye. He took a look and said, “Well…you mean besides the piece of metal stuck in there?” I didn’t believe him. He said, “No, really…there’s a piece of metal in your cornea.” I told him I had looked in my eye about a dozen times and hadn’t found anything. Granted—I was looking more at the eyelid and not at the eye itself, but still… But once he said it was there, and I went back to the mirror and looked again, when the light caught it just right, sure enough—there was indeed a tiny piece of metal in my eyeball. No wonder it had been scratchy for the past week and a half.

I asked him if he could take it out, and he said he’d have to remove the plank from his own eye first. And then he said I’d need to go to the eye doctor.

So the next morning I made a call, and when I mentioned the words “foreign object in my cornea” (as my doctor friend had instructed me to do), they were able to get me in within a few hours. They were also able to get the metal out without too much difficulty, and on my way out made the comment, “So you had that thing in your eye for a week and a half?” Yep. I did. Because I refused to get help.

The good news is there shouldn’t be any long-term damage. And my headaches are much improved already. And my eyelid no longer feels scratchy. And while still slightly blurry, my vision is much-improved.

The whole incident has got me thinking, naturally. Obviously a fair bit about the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount about taking the plank out of your own eye before trying to remove the speck in another’s eye. I was pretty miserable with just a tiny piece of metal shaving in my eye—how could anyone possibly have a plank in their eye and leave it there? Of course, on one level Jesus’ words are hyperbole, but on another they aren’t. We do, actually, leave the figurative planks in our own eyes. We’re willing to put up with a lot that doesn’t belong in our lives—a lot that is destructive to us and to others. In part, perhaps, because we don’t want to do the hard work to change. In part, perhaps, because we don’t want to admit we might be wrong. In part, perhaps, because it’s hard to really examine oneself. In part, perhaps, because we’d rather judge others than judge ourselves.