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.
Corneal crises
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 situations, but often begin with an abrasion to the cornea’s surface that allows a bacterium or other microorganism to break through and infect.
Contact lens misuse can both create the cut and house the bug.
“When you have a little break in that protective barrier — the epithelium of the cornea — it makes you vulnerable to the organisms that are normally on your ocular surface,” Kathryn A. Colby, chair of the Department of Ophthalmology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, told The Post.
In my case, over-wearing contacts while flying overseas likely nicked my eye. Then, any germs I’d collected splashing in the sea or confined in Comfort+ bloomed.
And so, two days after touchdown, I awoke with pain and light sensitivity in my right eye. When ChatGPT told me it was a medical emergency, that eye went ahead and rolled.
But the bot was right. Two days after getting a diagnosis and some generic antibiotic eye drops at CityMD, I landed at Mt. Sinai’s emergency eye clinic, the view from my right eye now a sheet of white. And while my pain was blessedly tolerable, Colby said corneal abrasions can rank up there with kidney stones and childbirth.
“Everybody has a different sort of pain tolerance,” Chen added, “but the usual look of someone with an ulcer is: The eye is red, they’re sensitive to light, they want to spend time in the dark, they can’t open their eyes. It’s a little bit swollen.”
I can see clearly now (kind of)
That’s more or less how I presented to the ophthalmologist at Mt. Sinai who “sampled” my baby blue to see which pathogen was present — a question we never got an answer to.
No matter, because the treatment worked.
The prescription included: Spending the next two days taking potent antibiotic eye drops every hour on the hour — even at night. (“No sleep tonight!” the doctor instructed a little too cheerily.)
Then: Visiting the hospital every day for the next five days before being weaned down to every other day and, later, once a week. In the past, Colby said, people like me were admitted to the hospital as inpatients instead of trusted to their own care at home.
But, with the support of an attentive spouse, the flexibility of self-employment and the circumstance of no kids, I pulled it off. I took antibiotic drops for weeks to fight the infection and steroid drops for a few more to diminish scarring.
“Your course is very typical, and a good one too,” Chen said. “You responded to medication, we tapered off slowly, changed you to a regular commercial antibiotic, added a steroid here and there to reduce inflammation, and you healed up with a small scar.”
In other cases, like when someone has an ulcer caused by a treatment-resistant amoeba, interventions can be as invasive as a corneal transplant.
An optical ordeal
Despite my relative luck, I give corneal ulcers zero stars.
Besides the hassle and cost of spending the first half of summer semi-hospitalized, I couldn’t swim for two months or wear contacts for 10 weeks.
I cancelled travel, extended deadlines and developed plantar fasciitis from attempting to exercise exclusively on land rather than in the pool. (Take pity on the chick holding up foot traffic on the way to the L train in June: She could barely see or walk.)
And take her advice, too: Clean your contacts well, change them often and remove them when flying, sleeping or swimming.
You’re even supposed to raw dog it, visually, when showering. Due to the microorganisms lurking in water, Colby said, “there is no safe way to swim with contact lenses, or shower, or use a hot tub.”
Alas, my contacts are now dailies, my goggles are now prescription and my glasses are now less embarrassing. (For those keeping score, my prescription includes a negative-9.5, so there’s a thickness cap on my spectacles’ cuteness.)
All that said, let’s be real: Not taking my advice doesn’t guarantee an ulcer. In reality, the fact that I went so long without one is a testament to how “hardy” the cornea is, Colby said. “All these people do these bad things to it, and we don’t all walk around with infections,” she said.
Still, from my slightly-hazy view, taking this resilient tissue for granted isn’t worth the risk. If I ever claw my way back to yacht-invite status, I’ll be doing it in glasses.
