The cornea's location, for those of us who slept through that class in high school

Well it seems that Lloyd won what will undoubtedly be the first is a series of playtime related injuries with our family.  You don’t live with an immature clumsy animal (Lloyd this time, not me) and get away completely unscathed.  Cael managed to get Lloyd’s paw in his eye somehow, and scratched his cornea.  Like any seasoned parents, Nikki and I were skeptical of Cael’s complaints that his eye hurt.  He would rub at it and it would get red, but then it would subside.  Added to that, when he played video games we mysteriously heard no complaints at all.  Anyway, by Sunday evening we were starting to think that there might be something going on for real.  That’s smack in the middle of the no-man’s land of closed medical clinics so we braced ourselves to the reality of walking into an emergency room without a sucking chest wound, chicken pox, or any other similarly messy and ghastly life threatening problem.
We all had red eyes by the time we were seen by a doctor (a resident) who got his boss to confirm that we were indeed dealing with something more than just a stray eyelash here.  In fact the doctor was very impressed with how tough Cael was, he said that most adults get a tiny scratch and tear up and complain bitterly.  Cael’s eye “looked like someone took sandpaper to it” and was abraded over 10% of his cornea and he was typically good-natured, even at 5am, and even after having his eyelid flipped back, which seemed to be hardest on Nikki.

Anyway, from there we basically camped out in the ER to wait for an opthamologist to come on at CHEO so we could be referred over there without starting the clock over again.  Nikki and Cael got some sleep in the bed, while I sat in the chair and watched the time just fly by until the on-site Tim Horton’s opened at 6:30am.  Several things come to mind: a dangerously low iPhone battery and no cell signal (which I’m not supposed to even use in the hospital) makes time REALLY go by fast.  In any case, I was not the only person in line waiting for the staff to make coffee and open up.

There’s more, but it’s mostly just waiting and driving.  By the time Nikki and I laid down for a sleep in our own bed, we had been more or less awake for 27 hours, and the sleep monkeys were shrieking with glee as they beat my head into the pillow.