I went to the emergency room on Sunday night. Ever since the kids came along I've been dreading having to take them there, but it turned out I was the one to get hurt first. I nearly put out my eye while doing a harmless bit of car repair. Here's how it happened.

Two of the door handles on our 2002 Toyota Sienna had broken. It's cause our kids have superpowers and don't know how to control them yet—a common problem amongst larval superheroes. I couldn't repair the sliding door myself, but I found a site outlining how to fix the rear door handle better than new. I'm not mechanically inclined, but I reckoned I could do what the site described. And it would save me the $130 the repair man would charge.

First I removed the inner part of the rear door and removed the broken latch. The latch was plastic—no wonder it had broken. Now all I had to do was drill a hole down through the latch into the lever that had broken off it, then screw the two back together. This would make the latch even stronger than it originally was: metal is stronger than plastic, you know.

Drilling through the parts went well until I realized I couldn't get the drill bit back out of the part. The bit was stuck so tight that the drill couldn't keep a hold on it. I tried prising it out in several ways; I even drilled a second hole right alongside the first, but the bit still would not budge.

I decided that what I needed was a tighter grip on the drill bit. So I clamped it with a pair of pliers and clamped the pliers in a vise. Then I rocked the part back and forth, trying to twist it off the bit.

With the inclusion of the pliers and vise I had involved quite a bit of force into this endeavor and realized the chance of something slipping, flipping, or cracking was non-zero. I said a little prayer that the handle wouldn't crack—I really hated to have to pay the repair man to replace it. Then I remembered my friend Chris, who had his eye nearly blown away a few months back in a freak accident, and I heard a little voice saying the same sort of thing could happen to me. "But of course it won't," I replied. "Nothing like that has ever happened to me. I'm the least accident-prone person I know." Still, I felt uneasy, and pushed my glasses closer up toward my face. I've worn glasses since I was a kid and they've saved me from many a flying chip, splinter, and pebble. But as I touched them I noticed they don't give the coverage my early-'80s serving platters did.

Even worse, they weren't even in a position to block whatever shrapnel might emerge from my twisting contraption. I'm needing bifocals, frankly, and what that means—for you young folk—is that I can't focus on something if it's between six and twelve inches from my face. I can look under my glasses at something if it's closer than six inches; I can look through my glasses at something if it's farther than twelve inches; but in the middle distance neither my eye nor my lenses give me focus.

I suddenly realized I was looking at this twisting contraption under my glasses, about six inches from my eye. So I moved it away to arms length. But I needed to see whether the drill bit was turning, so before I knew it I had moved in close again.

Now this is the moment when the drill bit should have wrenched free from the handle effortlessly, and I should have grinned at it triumphantly and carried on with my work. Instead, there was a sharp "ping" sound, and suddenly I was staggering back from the work table, the vision in my right eye was blurry and—holy cow—pink, and I've just shot out my eye.

It didn't hurt. It felt like a little dust had got in there. But when I pulled my hand back down and saw my fingers were covered in blood, I knew I had bigger problems than dust.

This is just going to keep getting worse, so stop reading now if you've had enough forensics.

I felt quite calm as I went into the house. My first thought was that the kids not see me. My second thought was that I could now joke with Chris about going to new lengths to identify with his troubles. My third thought was that I should get someone to take me to the emergency room. The order of those thoughts will tell you a great deal about my character.

I moved through the house to the bathroom and surveyed the damage. The good news: my left eye was perfectly fine. The bad news: my right eye looked like the horror section at the video store. I was literally crying blood. Some of the more enterprising droplets had stolen into my tear ducts and now emerged furtively from my right nostril. The white of my eye was flowing pink like a decorative waterfall at a Japanese garden. A thin sheet of tissue about the size of a fingernail emerged like an anemone and wavered every time I blinked.

I leaned under the faucet and rinsed. When I got up, there was a little tab of tissue left in the sink. I thought: "I've got a pretty good chance of losing this eye." I prayed that I wouldn't—that I'd come out of this unscathed.

Not wishing to cause alarm, I called to my wife in the most nonchalant, "Honey we're out of toilet paper," voice I could muster, and pondered what to do next. Usually I have a hard time planning a trip to the bathroom, but it took me no time to decide how to get to the hospital. Driving myself was out of the question. I couldn't ask my wife because someone had to stay with the kids. My parents were entertaining company. So I called up my nephew James. My wife came in as I reached him, and I told him to be on standby. Then I showed her what had happened. She gasped, looked more closely, gasped again, then went to the bed to wrestle with the temptation to faint while I asked James to drive me.

We were at the hospital for three hours—not bad at all for an emergency room visit. I spent most of the time resting on the bed, reading a good book and enjoying myself. I felt completely calm—no anxiety at all. The nurse found my heart rate and blood pressure to be normal. This will sound trite to some, but I knew from long experience that God would do right by me. I could live without one eye—there are worse things to lose. And I figured he would answer my prayer with a "yes." He usually does. Usually.

The doctor put weird drops in my eye and looked into it with a blue light. Then he gave me the diagnosis: subconjunctival hematoma.

The eye, it turns out, is a complicated thing. The white of the eye is a mass of tissue kept at a constant pressure by an elaborate pumping mechanism or something. Then you have the cornea, which is the clear "dome" over the iris—the colored part of the eye. What I didn't know was that the eye is enclosed in a kind of clear skin called the conjunctiva. What happened with me is that a little piece of the drill bit bounced off my cheek, making a small mark, and ricocheted across the surface of my eye making a long, but not terribly deep, scratch. It tore the conjunctiva and cut a little way into the white, then came out again. If it had stayed embedded, I would have been in agony—not to mention the unpleasantness of removing it. If it had struck a few millimeters to the right, I would now be blind, or facing endless surgeries, or both.

It merely broke a couple of vessels in the white of my eye, and this flooded the space between the white and the conjunctiva with blood. Thus the diagnosis: subconjunctival hematoma.

The injury did not damage my cornea. It did not affect my vision. It didn't mess with the sensitive pressure in my eye. All told, I got off easy. I needed a tetanus shot, antibiotic eye drops, and some saline solution. If I say, "Praise God," will you see what I mean? When God had warned me about my eye, I hadn't listened. But when I asked him to make it work out all right, he did listen.

I paid $100 for the privilege of using the emergency room, plus $35 for a check-up three days later. So much for saving money. The next day I braved working on the handle again, and found it was still unbroken. The drill bit had snapped off right where it exited the handle. I decided to leave it in there—more steel reinforcement. Then I finished fixing the van, and the rear door works better than ever.

My eye was dry and uncomfortable for a couple of days. Now it's fine. The only long-term effect is that I look like a demon-possessed thug. Even this downside has its advantages. I win a lot more arguments, for instance.

I learned three things from my experience.

1. Wear safety goggles.
2. There's a reason repair men charge the big bucks to fix things. Let them.
   
3. If a little voice inside your head says, "Maybe this isn't such a good idea," believe it.

Labels: faith