Subconjunctival hemorrhage aka Zombie Eyes
Today is day #11 after my eyes suffered what is technically known as Subconjunctival hemorrhage. In layman's terms, the tiny blood vessels in my eyes burst, creating a pretty freaky zombie type of effect. On Saturday morning, eleven days ago I had really violent vomiting, and after 3 or four times of painful dry heaving, I finally threw up something, I'm not sure what it was but it was out of my system and I felt a lot better. Earlier that morning I was just feeling groggy, I thought I must be hungover, but then I realized I didn't drink a lot. Certainly not enough to make me this sick, something else was up. Suddenly, I begun sweating and I felt a rush of heat to my head then it was off to the bathroom.
After throwing up something I ate the night before at a bar, I felt a lot of pressure in my head, and looking in the mirror revealed my face red and teary eyed because of throwing up. I know this happens so I thought it was normal. I felt better pretty much right after throwing up a couple of times. Later that day I went to brush my teeth and get ready to go out to dinner, I looked up at the mirror and there it was, a big cloud of blood creeping towards my iris and I think I actually yelled. It freaked me out, WTF was that. I looked it up online right away and after a few scary finds, everything said it would be okay. I just burst a blood vessel everyone suggested. Sure, its easy to say but when you look in the mirror and that thing keeps expanding, I'll tell you, its scary.
Trusting the likes of WebMD, Wikipedia, I was reassured it would all just be okay and go away in a couple days. That my friend is a bunch of baloney, The next day, the eyes were worse, both of them now had lots of red and it kept creeping in towards the center of my eye, it made my eyes water just looking at them. Monday morning came and about 3 in the morning, I just couldn't sleep anymore, I had to go check out the eyes again. Sure enough they were even worse!
I decided to go to the doctor, and after a boring wait watching some crappy nature show I got in to see the Dr. He checked out my eyes and found that it was in fact a lot of bleeding but it had stopped. He also explained that it was normal for this to happen from time to time --all the while I'm thinking, bullshit!-- and that some people get this just from sneezing. He proceeded to explain why this is not a problem or would become one. The bleeding happens at one plane in your eyeball, while your lens, iris, and other important sections of your eye are in different and sometimes separate planes. The only way for this to "bleed into" a sensitive are would be to have some sort of trauma, like a stab wound or something like that. So technically it would be okay but it wasn't going to take a couple days to clear out, it took a couple days just to stop spreading!
Well the Dr. sent me in my way and said it would take 2 - 6 weeks to clear out and there's nothing much we could do about it. He said nothing I do can help it except go about my normal day, eventually, as you see in some of the pictures, it will go away and that should be the end of it. It was kind of freaky to have my eyes like that for a while. I got people staring at the store, I got people that couldn't look at me in the eye when talking because their eyes would water. And of course I had my co-workers and friends wanting to see the eyes everyday just for the weirdness factor.
Some people knew what it was, they just wondered how it happened, some other people thought it was pink eye, and all the while it made for an interesting conversation topic for a while. I now just want my eyes to go back to normal, most people can't make eye contact after they look at the eye that looks the worse, they will just keep avoiding eye contact from there; its rather amusing.
