Discharge? As a concerned parent, I began trying to reason what would cause a kid to have discharge from his eye. Maybe he got jabbed in the eye on the playground, or maybe he rubbed some kind of toxic paste all over his face and got it in his eye.
"I hope its not pink eye", Ting announced nonchalantly.
Pink eye?! As a 33 year old male, my knowledge of pink eye was right up there with Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and Leprosy (actually I may have known more about Leprosy then I did about pink eye). What's pink eye? Can you lose your vision? Will Zoe have to wear an eye patch?
The next day at work I asked a couple of mom co-workers if they knew about pink eye. "Pink eye!", one exclaimed with a worried tone, "Have you washed your sheets and towels?". The other mom chimed in with a story about how pink eye was so contagious that her son's kindergarten class had to be quarantined. Geeze! What was this stuff?
Sure enough by the weekend Zoe was rubbing her eyes and we were dabbing out green mucus from the corner of her eyes. On Sunday morning Zoe woke up to find that her right eye had been glued shut overnight by the sticky discharge. She came running into our bedroom smiling but somewhat confused over her limited vision. Ting quickly warmed up a washcloth and wiped clean Zoe's eye so she could see again. Time to go to see the doctor.
I spent the rest of Sunday morning laundering every article of cloth we could find. Ting and Zoe came home from their visit to the doctor with a prescription for medicated eye drops. Zoe had developed a mild form of viral pink eye. It turns out that we would have to give Zoe the eye drops four times per day. I locked our squirming, glue eyed child in a headlock and Ting applied the drops.
By Monday Zoe was looking much better. Since pink eye is contagious, Ting spent the day at home with Zoe. Meanwhile at work I started clicking around Google doing some research on the disease that had struck down our daughter. Much to my horror there are many graphic websites out there with pictures of severe cases of pink eye (or conjunctivitis as it is known by its scientific name). While I won't go into the details I will only dare you to click on this link!
Monday night I noticed a strange burning in my eyes. Hmmm... Maybe I’m not getting to bed early enough these days? But I don’t feel so tired. On Tuesday I announced to Ting that I thought I had pink eye. That night I lay down on the floor while Ting put her squirming husband in a headlock and began to apply the eye drops.
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