Ballooning Creature Lands on Foreign World

My partner Leah got something in her eye this weekend. The wind was gusting pretty strong. I was in the back yard hanging up laundry. She was going in the backdoor when I heard her call me. Something had flown in her eye.

We could both see it there, a little, white, glistening flec at the border of her brown iris, at the 10 o'clock position. We tried flushing it out with drops. She tried lightly sweeping it out with her finger. It would not be removed and we wondered if it was a piece of glass. It was painful for her to open and close her eyelid.

We were just getting ready for friends to come over, so we left them a note to come inside, saying we were on the way to the emergency room.

We thought we were getting lucky when the initial intake of paperwork, questions and blood pressure exam was completed within 15 minutes. We were escorted to a curtained bed in a common room to await a doctor.

An hour and a half later, just about the time the surreal nonchalance of ER staff ordering burritos and joking with police officers was about to start bugging me, a doctor showed up. He was friendly and casual and put us at ease with his excellent bedside manner. He put some numbing drops in Leah's eye, went away,came back, put some more drops in and then prepared some crimson liquid on a little rectangle of paper. He balanced the thin strip carefully on her lower lid and then rolled the drop of liquid into her eye. It was a stain to help him see the foreign object.

He had Leah sit on a stool with her chin and forehead pressed into one of those optometry machines. With a long q-tip he gently swabbed the foreign matter away. Then looking back through the machine's magnifying lens he began chuckling. He said it looks like she'd had a tiny spider stuck to her eye.

He invited me to come around and look through the lens. He directed Leah to move her eye in place again and then he used a narrow blue light beam to focus on the spot. The stain had left a perfect outline where the spider was stuck -- a dot surrounded by seven rays. (We theorized one of it's legs had been lost in all the blinking and brushing.)

Our guests had managed to entertain themselves with their two young girls for the two hours we were away. We fixed dinner and had a joyful visit. All was well that ended well, except in the case of the spider.