The New York nightmare

During the two-week break before my final trimester at school, my mom and I decided to take a short trip to New York. Even though my dreams of modeling were long gone, I will always love New York and would live there in a heartbeat if money were no question. As much as my mom was completely against the idea of me going, she didn’t want me to have any regrets and so her and I made plans to go up there and scout out some cities to see if living there and opening a Chiropractic clinic were even an option. Sometimes it is hard to see the plan that God has for you, and other times it is completely obvious. I am one hundred percent certain that New York will remain an occasional vacation destination for me, instead of a place where I will live. The problems started before we even left Texas.

One of my best friends parents were in town and so we went out to dinner the night before our trip. As I was putting my contacts in that evening, I felt a sharp pain in my right eye just as the contact was put in place. I immediately took it out and rinsed it and then put it back in. Well it instantly started to turn red and was moderately painful. “Just ignore it”; I thought to myself, “it will go away.” So we go to dinner, and yea it is starting to hurt more and more. “Ignore it, ignore it”, I keep thinking to myself. We finished out the night and woke up early the next day to catch our flight to New York.

I looked in the mirror when I woke up…o my gosh… it was even worse. My eye was completely blood-shot and felt like it was on fire. So I smartly decided to go with wearing glasses that day…which was also fun because my glasses were not the right prescription. Constantly squeezing one eye shut because it hurt so badly and looking through the wrong prescription eyeglasses in your non-dominant eye can be quite challenging. Well I only thought my eye hurt before I got on the plane, but it was nothing compared to the pain I experienced while up in the air. The pressure from the plane increased my pain from probably a 5 to a 9 and I just prayed the whole time that we would get there quickly. Oh and did I mention we were seated in the absolute last row in the back of the plane with a screaming toddler right in front of us?

We finally get to New York; get a rental car and head to the hotel on Long Island we had already made reservations for. I felt so bad that my poor mom had to practically do everything herself because I couldn’t see a thing! At no surprise to us, once we got to the hotel we discovered they had reserved the wrong room for us. An easy fix once they finally figured out what had happened. We got situated in our room and then attempted to do some driving around but that just was not working. I couldn’t see a thing due to the fact that my eye hurt so badly and every time I tried to open it, my eye would start pouring with water. We decided to go to dinner and call it an early night. We attempted to “watch” a movie…meaning my mom watched and I listened.

The next morning I woke up…it was not good. My eye looked much worse. Okay we finally decided I had better go to a Doctor. Well guess what? It was now not only a Sunday, but we apparently take for granted all of the minor emergency clinics surrounding us back at home. It seems like there is one on every corner, as well as a hospital in every direction. Well in New York that was not the case. After a bit of effort, we finally found a hospital. I was thankful at this time to only have the one, non-dominant eye to see with, as this hospital was not at all up to the standards we were used to back home. My OCD nature was about to lose it, but we had no other option.

The Doctor who treated me was very nice and she quickly determined that I not only had punctured my eye, but also had literally taken a chunk of my eyeball off. I had wondered why there was this rather large, white section on the blue iris of my eye. I had also developed conjunctivitis (pink eye), no shock there. I then chatted with the Doctor about why I was in New York and she pretty much told me I was crazy for wanting to move there instead of staying in Texas and then proceeded to tell me all the reasons why it was a bad idea. Okay God, I get it. Right before I was done, the Doctor hands me this amazing beige eye patch she expected me to wear that was half the size of my face. She said I had to keep the light out of my eye in order for it to heal properly. Made sense because of the electric shooting pain I experienced when the light hit my eye. I said, “Yea for sure I will definitely wear this”. You are correct; I threw the eye patches in the trash before we even left the hospital. There was no way I was going to wear that. So instead I wore my eyeglasses with my sunglasses over them and just squinted my right eye closed. Because that looked much better right?

The whole rest of the trip was a bust. I couldn’t look at anything. We decided to take the train into the city so we could at least enjoy that. But guess what? There was a pretty serious protest going on! So that didn’t exactly work out either because we couldn’t even get to the places we wanted to get to. So overall the food was great, the company was great, and the memories will for sure last, but it is safe to say that I understood God’s answer on that one, loud and clear. God apparently wants me in Texas. My poor eye took a record slow time to heal. My eye Doctor said that she had a patient staple their eye and it didn’t take as long as mine did to heal. Yea…I have no idea how on earth someone staples their eye.