Monkey Vision Eye Hurting Goes To The Hospital

Yes, you read that correctly. It’s not a typo. It’s not a babbling, incoherent sentence. It’s merely a stated and true fact, Monkey Vision Eye Hurting did indeed go to the Hospital, and I’ll tell you how (sorry, this is going to be a very long post, as it was a very long weekend, and worst of all – we forgot our camera so no pics)!

It all started innocently enough. We had no plans of going anywhere. Saturday was to be all day working in the yard. Sunday to church, then home to relax. Easy enough, right? Oh you couldn’t be more wrong.

Saturday morning we got a call from my aunt Laurie literally begging us to come to my cousin Brandon’s Homecoming talk that Sunday. He just recently returned from his mission in Brazil, and while we’d heard about the homecoming, we weren’t really planning on attending as they live in Molalla, OR which is about 4 hours from us. But, the guilt trip phone call worked. Angie and I immediately started calling to get subs for our lessons on Sunday, and called my parents and told them we were on our way. My parents are about 2 hours away, then we’d be traveling together the rest of the way down to OR on Sunday morning.

When we got to my parents house, Austin and Luke started running around in the yard playing as normal. After they came in, Austin had a quick bath and got into his pajamas. A few minutes later my Mom comes in from the family room and says she thinks Austin needs Benadryl because his eye is starting to get red and puffy. We take a look and it was looking pretty swollen so Angie held a cold washcloth to his eye while my Mom and sister went to Wal-Mart for some Benadryl. After just a couple more minutes, and long before they returned with the Benadryl, his eye was massively swollen to the point where he couldn’t even blink. The whole area around his eye was red and swollen, but the worst part was that his actual eyeball was swollen too. All the white parts of his right eye were flaming with irritation and visibly swollen around his pupil. It looked like his pupil was a big hole in the middle of his newly engorged eyeball. It was getting worse way too quickly to wait for Benadryl, and had started spreading to his other eye as well, so we loaded him into the car and trooped off to the Hospital in Longview.

Meanwhile, of course, he’s crying and screaming about his eye, not because it hurt, but because he was scared and didn’t know what to expect. Angie was talking to him, telling him stories, and when he would allow himself to be distracted he would stop crying. So we knew he wasn’t in pain, he just didn’t know what was going on. One time he thought he heard Angie say his eye was going to pop and he really freaked out then. I don’t remember what she said, it certainly wasn’t that, but it was similar enough where we could understand why he thought that. At any rate, he was admitted immediately and then we played the waiting game to be seen and treated. Angie kept talking to him, telling him stories, jokes, anything to keep his mind off his eye.

One of the things we tried was to give him a secret spy code name for this mission he was one. I thought Raccoon would be good, due to the obvious situation with his eyes, but he didn’t like that one. Angie came up with a couple and those were rejected as well. Finally he announced he had come up with his code name. Are you ready for this? “Monkey Vision Eye Hurting.” It took us two or three times before we could even realize/verify that we were hearing him correctly. But yes indeed, he was to be special agent Monkey Vision Eye Hurting for this very covert mission.

Shortly thereafter the doctor arrived and checked him out. He wasn’t in any real hurry so we figured it couldn’t have been all that serious. And then of course he prescribed some Benadryl to aid in the relief. But he did also prescribe some extra steroids to further combat the problem, which was officially diagnosed as nothing more than an allergic reaction. To what we don’t know, but an allergy of some sort.

Austin was a terrific patient, and always has been. He lets all his doctor’s check his ears, eyes, nose, and throat. He takes deep breaths when instructed. He’s just a great little patient. Until you try to give him medicine that is. That’s when it takes Angie and two other nurses pinning him to the bed to get him to swallow. Alas, he survived the ordeal, and even got a stuffed cow out of it, which he promptly named Otis. For those of you not in the know, that’s the name of the cow on the movie Barnyard.

So there you have it. That’s the story of Monkey Vision Eye Hurting’s trip to the hospital. For those of you keeping tally, this makes three ER visits for Austin, and yes he is just three years-old. You’ll remember that his other two visits were results of a broken arm and a broken leg, both of which occurred before he was two. But those are other stories and memories, perhaps for another day and time.

P.S. As soon as the mission was completed, i.e. we were on our way back to Grandma and Grandpa’s from the hospital, Austin promptly informed us his code name had changed to Monkey Vision Eye Feeling Better.