My 2.4 mile swim update. I know many of you were asking how I did. Well here is how things went down yesterday. My swim started @ 8:30 AM. The course was a 1.2 mile rectangle, 2 laps. I was in the water @ 8:25 where we swam out to the starting point. While waiting at the starting point for the race to start I took my goggles off and on a few times because my eyes were a little itchy. I never thought anything about it, I just figured it was due to the fact that I was wearing a different pair of goggles than I usually do. My normal pair has been leaking lately and these were a little tighter and sat closer to my eyes, BUT did not leak. Half way through the second lap (1.8 miles into the race and .6 miles left to go) it was getting really had to see the buoys in water. I thought it was because of the glare of the sun on the water, and from my goggles fogging up, so I flipped on my back and took my goggles off to see were the buoys were. That is when I noticed that everything was still foggy. I put my goggles back on and saw one of my teammates, Shane, was swimming past me. I figured that I would just follow her all the way to the finish. That was pretty hard to do as Shane is a very good swimmer. I managed to finish the swim with only being able to see out of my right eye and not being able to see the marker buoys very well. Shane and I finished the race at the same time. After the swim my friends drove my car back to Rockford and took me straight to the immediate care clinic. I had to be guided into the clinic by Shane Baker and Kristy Johnson (thanks guys) because it was too painful to open my eyes. Alison Tadd Hoffman and the girls meet me at the clinic. The doctor at the clinic put some dye in my eyes and checked them under a black light. Both eyes had scratches on the cornea but my left eye was far worse. He found scratches covering the entire cornea and my left eye had a haze covering it. He said he had never seen anything like it and that I should be admitted to the ER. He called ahead to the ER so that they would be expecting me. Alison and the girls drove me over to the hospital. Once at the ER they called in an ophthalmologist who did some more tests and said that my left eye was pretty scratched up. We’re not sure what happened, a few theories are that I might not have rinsed the anti-fog chemical out of my goggles good enough before the race. I could have scratched them with my goggles when adjusting them in the water at the beginning of the race, or a little of both, scratching them a little bit but then having the anti-fog chemical swishing around in the scratches. The doctor gave me lots of pain drops, pain pills (Hydrocodone) and some antibiotic eye ointment (like Neosporin) that I need to put in my eyes three times a day. Basically right now it feels like I have sand in my eyes every 4 hours when the pain pills wear off. It’s getting less and less painful and I should be feeling OK by sometime tomorrow.
Posted on: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 01:08:59 +0000
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