Pokemum

Just as I was packing up at work this evening, I received a phone call from J on my mobile. Having just spoken to her and being given a list of things to pick up from the supermarket on my way home, I inevitably reached for the post-it and pen.

“Can you just come straight home?” J asked, sounding somewhat stressed.

“Is everything ok?” I asked, cautiously. I was waiting to hear the sound of screaming pitched battles between the twins erupting in the background. But all was strangely quiet.

“E’s just poked me in the eye and it really hurts.  I don’t mean ‘really’, I mean really,” she said, with the kind of emphasis that says “I’m worried” behind the evident pain.

About 20 minutes later, as I turned into the road that ran past the supermarket on the way home, I thought I’d call  just in case the pain had died down. However by now, she was clearly holding back the tears.

At home, the kids were lying on our bed watching IgglePiggle, with J semi-foetal with her eyes firmly closed.  In the dark. It wasn’t looking good.

Her right eyeball was certainly angry red, but I couldn’t see any cuts or scratches. I decided to err on the side of caution. As I ran the bath for the twins, I put on some pasta, asked J (with no hint of sarcasm or irony) to ‘keep an eye on it’.

I’m somewhat tactless, as you can tell.

As I bathed O&E, O berated E for her part in Mummy’s unhappiness. “No poke O in the eye,” he said, obviously concerned that she was some sort of compulsive optical attacker. I quizzed E on what happened. She suggested that it hadn’t been her finger, it had been a book. It was the book’s fault. Unsurprisingly, I began to question the validity of trusting a 2-year-old’s testimony.

I put a call in to our babysitter and thankfully she was free and drove straight round. We wolfed down some pasta (it’s normally a long wait in A&E), and headed the 600 yards or so up the road to the hospital.

Astonishingly, about five minutes after sitting back down in the waiting area having completed all the forms (“No, it’s *this* eye. The red one…”), J’s name was called. [This was obviously the benefit of coming before pubs start the hospital rush, with chucking-out-time, followed by violent chucking-up time and the usual violent chucking-each-other-around time. I must remember to only get seriously injured or ill at 7pm.]

After putting in some anaesthetic drops (which evidently stung to high heaven initially but within a few seconds becalmed J hugely), the surgical intern then proceeded to examine J’s lids and bloodshot eyeball. He squeezed in a few drops of orange dye and then shone a blue light onto her cornea to look for damage. In my usual, insensitive way, I found the whole thing fascinating and, evidently enjoying having someone to explain it to who wasn’t petrified with fear, the intern called me round to take a look.

Right across her eyeball, from the centre of the pupil to the tear duct at the edge near her nose, there was a big scratch, showing up bright green under the blue light. This was no little dot as I had been expecting. It looked like her eyeball had been attacked with an angle grinder. No wonder she was in such intense pain.

Given some antiseptic ointment to put under the bottom eyelid four times a day, J was also told that there was no realistic prospect of her being able to look after two demanding kids for a couple of days. She should really lie in bed with a cold flannel on her eye and not open it. I I hadn’t been in the room for the entirety of the examination, I’d have suspected foul play.  I knew I had to offer…

“I’d better take a couple of days off, hadn’t I?”

“I think that would be best,” he replied.

Amazingly, we were back home in only a little over an hour, during which time our babysitter had done all our ironing. What an angel.

Unfortunately, that was also just about enough time for the anaesthetic to wear off. J began to squirm with pain. I could tell it was pretty bad – she couldn’t even watch Raymond Blanc’s show which this week was on patisserie baking; J’s ultimate passion.

I settled her in bed with another squirt of antiseptic ointment and went off to the supermarket pharmacy to buy what every woman really wants: an eye patch. I’ve yet to give it to her, but I’m hoping a few days of pretending to be Gabrielle might help her recover faster.

So today has been yet another of those odd days that always seem to hit us when we least expect. They’ve certainly seemed to come more frequently since the arrival of the mini-loons. Is it wrong to dream of boring normality? What delights will tomorrow bring? Pancreatitis?

Advertisement