Listen, I am sick of going to A&E!

So this weekend, we went to see Timon of Athens at the Globe with some friends. Going to the Globe is my second favorite stereotypically touristy thing to do in London. The first is going to the Tate Modern. Anyhow, we stood in the yards and watched the play which was good. I knew very little about it going in and really enjoyed the staging of it, although do have a few issues with the fact that the only women who got speaking lines in it were hookers sent forth to give disease to the men of Athens, but whatever, pick your battles and all that.

Afterwards we went to Scooterworks and had some nice coffee and talked and then moved on to a restaurant called Tas for some mezze. While eating my eye began to itch, so I rubbed it lightly and then it began to itch more, so I rubbed it again, and then it started to hurt. So I went to the ladies' loo (alliteration, yay!) and tried to figure out what the hell was causing all this trouble. I pulled back the eyelids and looked in every direction, I dripped water into my eye to flush it out but couldn't find a damn thing. So I finished dinner with a hugely bloodshot eye and then we took the bus home.

After an hour it was still hurting, actually hurting more so Jeremy made me call the medical out of hours line for Southeast London and they were like "Dude, go to A&E." And I was like, "Fuck. Fuck. Fuck."

But we went to A&E where the kind assessment nurse gave me some local anesthetic and that helped for a bit but since it took 2 hours in the waiting room to purgatory that is a London A&E (although at least this time there were no bloody tissues on the floor and we did get called back before they paged someone to come to the waiting room with a mop and bucket (score!)) to see anyone it wore off before we went back to meet my new friend Les the Nurse Practitioner.

Les poked at my eyelids with Q tips and gave me some bad flashbacks to my one viewing of The Clockwork Orange. Jeremy bravely turned his back to me and stared at a corner while I said the following "Ow, ow ow owowowowowowowow ow ow ow ow owowowowowo ow." And then, THEN, Les was all like, "Hey how about some more local anesthetic in your eyeball now after I've finished shoving foreign objects in your poor sad bloodshot aching watery eye, Caroline." Way to be, Les.

Anyhow, after dumping some orange dye into my eye and shining a million lights into it Les found some small abrasions on my cornea. There was nothing foreign in there just the scratches from whatever had caused the trouble in the first place. So Les gave me some eye drops and sent me home but asked me to come back in the morning to make sure everything was cool.

So home we went and I put the drops in my eyes and took the codeine he gave me for the pain so I would fall asleep more easily and put on an eye mask to keep myself from touching my eye anymore. The eye mask, sadly, is the reason I was unaware that Oliver the cat fell off the bedroom window ledge while hissing at the neighbor cat (a long haired black cat I like to call Trouble), but luckily, Oliver is a cat and he easily survived his tumble and is now much more careful when sitting on window ledges.

Anyhow, when I woke up on Sunday I was much improved, just itchy and a little swollen, no longer watering and painful. But we went back to see Les the sadist once more and he declared that I was much improved and that I should continue on with the drops and all should be well.

Today has been better as well, but still, enough with the A&E for the summer, okay? Twice in one summer is more than enough, I think I've met my quota now and will happily stay away for the next year or ten if possible.