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Last night, for the umpteenth time, my eye fell out in my sleep.<\/p>\nLast night, for the umpteenth time, my eye fell out in my sleep.<\/p>\n
To be fair, what probably happened was that it got stuck open and became irritated and I took it out without waking up. Usually I wake up and take it out and put it somewhere sensible, but not always.<\/p>\n
This morning I woke up, got out of bed and put my hand to my face, whereupon I realised that the socket was empty. Thus commenced the search of all the usual places. I hunted under the pillow, in the bed, inside the pillow case, under the bed and between the head of the bed and the wall. Nothing. I searched the usual places again. Still nothing. I searched some more unlikely places, and came up empty.<\/p>\n
Uh-oh.<\/p>\n
I have this irrational fear that one night I’m going to take it out and mistakenly swallow the damn thing. It’s not entirely irrational: my artifical eye is made of plastic and the tear duct doesn’t work very well, so in very cold or dry weather it dries out, the eyelids stick in the open position, it collects dust and becomes irritated. When I was younger I had a bad habit of taking it out, licking it and putting it back in again. As disgusting as this sounds, it’s remarkably effective. In fact I have been known to give it to Frood and let him put it in his mouth so he can do a tricyclops impression. It has an excellent squick factor. The socket is far more infection resistant than you might think.<\/p>\n
In other words, the idea of me putting it in my mouth while asleep isn’t so very far-fetched.<\/p>\n
I’m not above letting an eye pass through and retrieving it for a disinfectant bath, although there’s the tricky issue of finding it once it has been, ahem<\/i>, expelled; and I did have my other eye for work, so it wasn’t like I couldn’t leave the house. But it was my black one, which was so difficult to get I have no desire to lose it. The NHS will replace my “normal” eye without complaint, but they think that my black one is out of order. It’s apparently their job to “make [me] look normal” and they can’t understand why I want a black one at all.<\/p>\n