Don’t poke yourself in the eye with a stick – or anything pointy for that matter. Just take my word on this. You know what? Now that I think about it you might not want to poke yourself in the eye with a blunt or even a squishy object either. I know, the theme of Nice is less about the technical, and more about the why, so let me tell you why…

WARNING: I pretty much kind of swear a few times in this post. If you have virgin eyes, you better wear some protection.

Unfortunately this is not a joke and actually happened to me.

Yesterday I was putting a hand truck away in the garden shed when I was viciously and methodically attacked. The bastard, knowing I’m a photographer, jabbed me in the eye – my PHOTO EYE! Yeah, my left eye, the one I look through the camera with. The most F’d up part is that I knew the assailant. It was an inside job. Who was this sick hoodlum? It was one of the trees in my back yard.

Yes, the tree attacked me! Sure, over on his blog he said that I wasn’t looking where I was going and walked into him. Yeah, right! Regardless, it hurt so bad I fell to the ground. My wife looked at my eye and as calmly as she could said, “Holy crap! There’s a huge chunk missing from your eyeball!!!”

Man, it hurt. Headache pounding. Eye itchy and throbbing. Stinging, too. Ahhh! It’s my camera eye!!! Stay calm. Cover my good eye. Looking just through my injured eye I realize it’s crap. I mean useless. No good. Splert! Yeah, I said splert! Everything is foggy and smeary at the same time.

So do we run off to the emergency room? Are you crazy? And let some bone-cracker touch my eye? Is “bone-cracker” a good put down for an emergency room doctor who has like one of the hardest jobs in the world and is clearly a better person than I’ll ever be as far as giving back to the world and I’m trying to come up with a “better” put down name for him? I’m a monster! Still, I wanted a specialist! No emergency room for me.

Problem. Specialists usually require an appointment way in advance. They tend to like you to have an insurance plan that they are members of, oh yeah, and they close at 5pm and it’s now 5:30. Still, my lovely wife (at least through my good eye – through my crap eye she looked like some sort of cotton candy explosion), told them what happened and they said they would see me and stay late to do it.

We hustled down to Ventura Blvd (about 10 minutes away) walked right in. The folks at Encino Optometric were great. Such nice people. They took great care of me. Turned out my wife was right. There was a big chunk of eye missing that had torn off right over my pupil, not the ideal place to have part of your eye ripped off. Though at the moment, I’m having trouble pinpointing what would be the ideal place. If you have any ideas, feel free to leave a comment. In addition to the chunk that was rendered absent, I also had a scratch that ran almost the entire length of my eye. F’n tree!!!

Dr. Phoo took a digital photo of the wound so I could see it for myself. Guess what the first thing I said to him was when I saw the image? No, not, “How did you light that?” I said, “Can you email that to me so I can put it on my blog?” As you will see, he said yes.

He dilated my eye. I really didn’t want him to, but then he explained that dilating it was like putting a sprained arm in a sling. For some reason that escapes me now, that made me feel better about the idea at the time. Then he loaded me down with a bunch of antibacterial, anti fungal eye drops and patched up my eye. No, not a cool pirate eye patch. That would have rocked. Apparently that’s too old school for the good doctor. He applied what he called a “contact patch” which is like a contact lens, but is just there to protect the eye. What, no fashion statement?

Now I’ve been walking around keeping my left eye closed pretty much all the time. This has completely killed my depth perception. You know, the reason you see things in 3D or with depth is because your brain takes the input from two eyes and magically makes you know how far away your ice-cream sandwich is from your face so you don’t smear it all up in your nose and sh*t. Hence the title of this post: The World Is Flat. Right now that’s what my world is: Flat.

What’s that? Why yes, I did say I was going to post the image of my messed up eye. Here it comes now.

The doc says I should heal up fast, like a week. And as long as I don’t scar, my sight should eventually return to normal. That’s better than what is in store for that tree. In the mean time could someone get me a napkin, I’ve got ice-cream sandwich in my nose holes.

Nice!

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