He’s fine but has a scratched cornea. Always wear safety goggles, kids.
After Anna dropped the kids off from their overnight stay, Owen started complaining that his eye was bothering him. I figured he had an eyelash or something in his eye so told him to let it water and flush itself out. Nope, still there. I looked, nothing. I then tried to rinse it out—a challenge considering everything was obviously packed and I couldn’t find my saline, squirt bottles, or eye drops. (I might not have been in the best frame of mind, either. After another long day with the movers, now I’m having to deal with this at 3pm.)
So then it became the challenge of him letting me actually get his eye rinsed out. First he wouldn’t even let me get near his eye. Then he kept shutting his eye. Then he couldn’t tip his head back. Good times. I finally got some water in and he said it really hurt. Hmmm, that’s not good. So then I had to decide whether to see if we could get in to his doctor, go to urgent care, the ER, or try his eye doctor. I picked eye doctor and of course they had no appointments locally (they are five minutes from us) but a sister office 30 minutes away had an opening…so off we went. One quick look with some eye drops and yep, two small scratches. We were in and out within about 15 minutes.
And you can believe we had a big conversation about preventing things like this because the simple act of not wearing goggles meant we had to pay $70 for the appointment, $15 for the meds, and then another $70 for the follow up appointment. I told him we’d obviously always take care of these things, but that money could have gone to…a whole year of Netflix. Or about six trips to Culver’s. Or half of an Xbox. You should have seen the look on his face when he learned that. So hopefully that sunk in.
So how did this happen? The boys were (apparently) sanding wood blocks with a block and sandpaper—no power tools involved because David had wisely put the kibosh on that. I asked why he didn’t wear goggles and he said there was only one pair and one of the boys was smashing something into pieces so he wore them. Owen said he would sand and tried to keep blowing the dust away from him…?!