A Fight for Sore Eyes

[warning: GRAPHIC!]

During my college years, I worked as a cashier at Target. And because these were my college years, I often went into work fairly haggard or hung over. One particular morning, after an evening of not even partying, I looked especially awful. My right eyeball was red and puffy. And instead of the typical morning crust resting in the corner of my eye, there was a small goo. I wiped it away with some tissue and doused myself with eye drops hoping for an easy fix.

When I arrived to work, I immediately found my supervisor. “I’m worried I have pink eye,” I told him. He shrugged. “It’s probably nothing. I need you on register five immediately.” Since I often looked busted from a night of drinking, he probably didn’t think this was all
that different.

I hopped on the register and for a while, things were ok. If nothing else, I hoped my red, puffy eye would at least match my red and khaki outfit. Customers didn’t seem to notice … at first. But in a couple hours, things shifted. The eye started to itch; perhaps even burn. Each time I rubbed it, another small amount of goo ended up on my hand. I would run to the bathroom and wash my hands only to get scolded by the supervisor for leaving the register.

After another hour passed, I was physically ill: light-headed, a little nauseous. And by then the customers were definitely giving me strange looks. My eye had apparently gotten worse.

“I think I need to leave and go see a doctor about this. I’m not feeling very good,” I told my supervisor. He ignored my request. “I haven’t seen you ask a single guest if they wanted to sign up for a Target card. You know you’re supposed to ask every single guest. Do I need to write you up again?”

On my lunch break, I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror as things continued to get worse. Any time I pressed lightly on my lower eyelid, quite a bit of goo would ooze out onto my face now. It was disgusting. I immediately called the campus clinic and they said they could see me in an hour.

I ran over to the supervisor and announced that I was leaving. “You can’t leave,” he said. “You have four more hours on your shift.” I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to stand up to him and fight for my eye health. I yelled at him about how the customers were getting grossed out at my face and if I had pink eye, I could be passing it on to them. There could be no greater reason as to why I should stay. And I left against his wishes.

Once at the campus clinic, the doctor examined me. “This isn’t pink eye,” she said. “Most likely … it’s gonorrhea.”

“What?!” I shot up alarmed. “But that’s an STD!”

“Yup,” she said while grabbing a large q-tip to swab my eyeball. “It happens.”

I had never had an STD before, and apparently gonorrhea isn’t just reserved for penises or vaginas as I had once thought. It can also infect eyes, throats, buttholes, and even joints. “How does this happen?” I asked her.

The doctor explained that these various body regions just need to come in contact with an infected sex organ and transmission can easily occur. Upon her explanation, she raised her eyebrow. I felt slightly offended. Just because I was gay didn’t mean I ran around rubbing other men’s genitals into my eyes. I was much more complex
than that.

She gave me some antibiotics and prescription eye drops and sent me on my way. In a few days, she called up and confirmed that I did in fact have gonorrhea in my eye. I was totally baffled as to how that could have happened. But leave it to me to get my first STD in the most obscure place possible.