A harrowing close call with color blindness

Last Friday, the weekend got off to an unexpected early start when The Boy’s school called me on my cell phone around lunch time. When the school calls, you know something bad has happened. They never call to just say that your kid is doing great and setting a shining example for all the other little rugrats.

In this case, they were calling to tell me that one of The Boy’s classmates had inadvertently poked one of his eyes. The teacher wasn’t very clear about exactly how it happened or how bad the injury was. She just said “some red stuff” was visible and she advised taking him to the doctor to have it checked out.

Not knowing whether “some red stuff” was a horribly bad description of blood or a euphemism for actual eye innards which had erupted to the surface, I shut everything down at work and went to go pick him up. The Wife called the pediatrician’s office and worked us in to see the doctor immediately (no small feat on a Friday), so all I had to do was get him there. About halfway there, I convinced myself that The Boy was going to have to go through life with just one eye and began contemplating the challenges he’d face as the only one at his elementary school with an eye patch.

Fortunately, when I got there The Boy seemed to be doing fine and, although there had been some tears, his eye didn’t look too bad. What the teacher so eloquently described as “some red stuff” appeared to be a burst blood vessel. I still wanted to get his vision checked out and make sure that there wasn’t any kind of hidden injury, but I was fairly reassured that he wasn’t going to lose the eye.

During the brief trip from the school to the doctor’s office, I asked The Boy how he was doing, trying to gauge for myself whether his eyesight had been affected or not. He assured me that he could see the other cars just fine. Yes, he could read the display on the radio. Yes, he could see how many fingers I was holding up.

Then it must of occurred to him that if everything was fine, he might have to go back to school. Suddenly, he came down with a most serious condition.

“I can read things okay, but I’m color blind now,” he told me matter-of-factly. And he wasn’t stricken with just any kind of color blindness, he was quite insistent that he couldn’t see the color white.

So I pointed to some white flowers and asked him what color they were.

“Purple.”

And the white letters on the elevator buttons?

“Orange.”

Miraculously, once I told him that he wouldn’t have to go back to school that afternoon, his color blindness went away and his normal sight was restored just as we walked into the doctor’s office.

I’m happy to report The Boy officially had 20-20 vision in both eyes and no apparent long-term injuries. The doctor used an ultraviolet light to show me the bruising on The Boy’s eye (it covered about half of it and looked pretty bad) and then gave us a prescription for a ridiculously small bottle of eye drops.

The Boy hasn’t been thrilled about taking eye drops twice a day, but his eye does seem to be getting better. We’re not having to shop for eye patches, so I guess we should consider ourselves lucky.

Fries at the bottom of the bag

• It’s fun to play with bread bags.
• It’s also fun to stare at your brother while he eats. No, it’s really, really fun.
• After looking at the amount of plastic sandwich bags we go through on a weekly basis, I decided to do some impromptu recycling when I packed my lunch the other day.
• Just in case you were worried that 20-inch side monitor looked silly next to my new computer at work, rest easy – it’s already been upgraded. Obnoxiously large monitors rock.
• And after clearing out some of the clutter in my office, I’ve got a lot of empty wall space now. I’m going to have to find something to help break up some of the off-white monotony.