Exclusive | I made an innocent mistake on an international flight my eyesight may never be the same again
It was Memorial Day weekend in New York City — the dawn of a jubilant city summer buzzing with Knicks and World Cup energy — and I sat in a windowless East Village hospital room, right eye pried wide. As an ophthalmologist steered a small blade toward my cornea to “collect a sample” (translation: scrape the surface) for testing, I panicked.Would tears dilute the antiseptic? She doused me with more. I also wallowed.
How did I get here? Just last week, I told the doc, I was sipping champagne in a hot tub aboard a superyacht in Greece.(I know: Cry me a river.) “How far you’ve fallen,” she said, unimpressed. But my rapid descent from the lap of luxury to the bowels of an infirmary wasn’t coincidental.
Rather, I most likely wound up in the latter due to poor choices in the former. Namely, I failed to remove my contact lenses ahead of my 11-hour flight back home, as well as throughout the 24 hours I stayed awake traveling.I also wore them while swimming (with goggles) and showering (without goggles) — things I’ve done without issue near-daily my whole adult life. The result of one or all faux pas was a “gnarly,” per one medical resident, corneal ulcer on the bullseye of my vision.
At one point, I couldn’t see out of my right eye at all. And yet, it could have been far worse, Masako Chen, the ophthalmologist who oversees the resident clinic at New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mt.Sinai, where I went, told me later. “We’re a tertiary referral center, so we see a lot of really bad ulcers,” she said.
“And so on a scale, you’re on the mild to moderate side of things.” While I’m left with a small scar blurring a fraction of my vision, in the most severe and rare cases, a person can lose their vision — and even their whole eye.A corneal ulcer is basically an open sore on your cornea, the clear dome covering the front of the eye and one of, if not the most, sensitive tissues in the body. Ulcers can arise from all sorts of...