A couple weeks ago, I had a dramatic, semi-life-threatening experience. It was around 11pm, and I was exhausted. I was trying to sleep, but I could tell something was in my eye.
I tried blinking as fast as I could, and it didn't do anything. Next, I tried to hold my eyelid up and blink, because I heard that helps, but it still hurt.
I finally decided to get out of bed and deal with the issue in hopes of getting some comfortable sleep.
Of course, when I got up to deal with the issue, I was greeted by a spider outside of my bathroom. It was exactly what I needed to deal with at the moment. I could see enough to kill the spider before I looked at myself in the mirror.
I couldn't see anything in my eye because it was red. The kind of red where you may have pink-eye, but you tell everyone it's allergies so you aren't treated like an outcast, red. I began flushing my eye with water (thank you Science lab safety) praying that it would feel better. I tried this method for about two minutes before giving up and going back to bed.
I tried to go to sleep, but could not relax. How can you relax when it feels like there is a nail in your eye? With no other ideas, I decided to turn to the Internet. I started on Pinterest, looking up "how to get something out of your eye," but the results were similar to what I had already tried.
I explored some more DIY ideas that involved me going to Walmart for supplies before typing my situation into Google.
"How can I get something out of my eye after I have tried everything and need to sleep?"
After some clicking, I wound up on a Yahoo Answers page where the person looking for help was in an extremely similar situation.
Reading through the answers, one stuck out to me. It said that I had irritated my eye enough, so I should put on a cold eye mask and go to bed. If it wasn't gone in the morning, I needed to go to the doctor.
The ultimate miracle of the night was not the speck being removed from my eye, but the fact that I own a cold eye mask. I promptly got it out of my fridge and laid down– realizing that now the frostbitten sensation on my eyes took away from the original discomfort.
I fell asleep with the mask on my face, and woke up to a clear eye, free of any irritation.
But what if I hadn't?
What if I lost an eye because I listened to somebody from Yahoo Answers?
Obviously, common sense plays a large role when you're searching for answers on the Internet, but how can we trust individuals when referencing topics we know nothing about?
