When I was in the shower the other night, a drop of rinsed water from my
body sponge spattered right into my right eye. I washed my eye in haste
over and over so as no to get germs. It was one of those things that
happen all the time in our daily life and I didn’t worry so much. I
actually had forgotten about it by the time I went to sleep.
The next morning I stood in front of the bathroom sink with sleepy
eyes as usual and saw my face in the mirror. In it, my right eye had a
large smudge of blood in the white. My drowsy brain got electrified and I
was instantly wide awake. It wasn’t simply bloodshot but a stain of
blood spread in the half of the eye. It was ominous enough to frighten
me badly. I remembered the water spatter in the shower, but it seemed
too small to cause this big damage.
Is this a foretaste of some kind of a serious disease? Is a heart
attack or something imminent? Am I going blind? Do I need to rush to the
hospital that I hate so much and always keep away? Besieged by all
kinds of sinister questions, I remembered I’ve often heard a bad
reputation that the only hospital in my small town in the mountains has
no good equipment nor good doctors. At the same time, I remembered a
scene in some movie I once saw in which a man had the similar bloody
smudge in his eye when he was about to die.
I sat at the table for breakfast across my partner with a mountainous
amount of fear. As soon as he glanced at me, he stopped crunching
cereal and turned pale. I asked him what was wrong and he answered that
it was my eye. He looked into it for a moment then said that his eye
sight became white out and couldn’t see anything. He started sweating
heavily and claimed that sweat didn’t stop pouring out. He left for the
bathroom in the middle of breakfast.
His reaction threw me deeper in terror. My eye with a smudge of blood
must have been so horrible that he became sick. Since he’s a big fan of
a TV drama ‘The Walking Dead’, he may have thought one of the zombies
finally came to reality and appeared to him. The situation was reversed
and he looked more ill than I was. About ten minutes later, thankfully,
he felt better and resumed his cereal.
I was anxious all day long. I imagined I might fall flat at any
moment. I might go unconscious or blind. Even if I kept surviving, I
couldn’t go outside with this eye on my face especially because I
foolishly care my appearance too much. With fear clawing hold of me, I
spent the day moving slowly and quietly as if I was living in total
darkness.
In the evening, my partner who had looked up my symptom on the
Internet told me it was perfectly nothing wrong and would disappear by
itself gradually in one to two weeks. That sent me the light from above
with the angels’ choir. It was nothing! Suddenly I felt like I breathe
again, and couldn’t feel any stupider. I wondered why I didn’t look up
online by myself first thing in the morning. I had been dreadful all day
and wasted the day just for nothing. As it turned out, all I needed was
to wait for the smudge to disappear. I would pass the coming one to two
weeks by donning this eye, avoiding acquaintances, trying to see as
less residents as possible on the hallway of my apartment building,
wearing sunglasses when eating out, and generally hiding away. While I
was relieved and cheerful about that I wasn’t ill, another depressing
feeling seized me as I thought about my life in hiding for the coming
weeks...
Saturday, September 15, 2018
A Bloody Smudge hr610
Labels:
blood,
darkness,
die,
fear,
hospital,
nothing,
pale,
small town,
The Walking Dead
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