PARANOIA IS A MEANS OF SURVIVAL

You know you’re in paranoid mode when you smell your newly-opened can of diet Pepsi just to be sure… and even then you’re not sure.

I failed to mention this earlier this week because, well, I had other things on my mind.  Monday I started the week at the office with contact lenses.  I didn’t wear them on the plane because I’d be wearing them too long and in dry-air environments and didn’t want to wide up blind in Bangalore.  Monday seemed like a good day to go back to them.

Now, one of the most important thing about contact lenses is that you want to keep them clean and sterile.  You don’t want particles in your eye, to be sure, but more than that you most definitely want to keep your eyes free of microbial life that don’t belong there.  So one of the practices I was advised to adopt, and have been religiously following involves washing my hands with soap and water before handling anything related to the contact lenses and poking them into my eyeballs.

Only here, the water is suspect.  Very suspect.

So, what can I do?

PURELL!  Yes!  Saved!

So proud that I am smart and resourceful, I throw a healthy dollop of Purell anti-life-form hand cleanser on my hands and rub that stuff in.  That oughta teach those little punks a lesson.  Then, as is intended by nature and mandated by law, I start waving my hands around like Homer Simpson when he starts to freak out about something so that I can get the Purell after-glow to evaporate from my now sanitized hands.

If anyone was able to peek inside my hotel room, I’m sure it would look like a silly, overweight American trying in vain to fly around his hotel room like a frightened parakeet.

Ok, so hands properly purified, I head back to the contact lens paraphernalia.  I reach down to get one of those suckers on a finger and think… wait a sec.  What if the Purell is still there on my hands but just doesn’t feel wet anymore?  What if that stuff gets into my eye?  Will it melt my eyeball?  And if it does, what do I do then?  I have some bottled water… can I put dump that on an eye?  That stuff is a limited resource.  Am I willing to trade it for an eyeball?

I’m at one of those fork-in-the-road places in life.  What do I do?

I know… I’ll pour some bottled water on my fingers and rub anything left of the Purell off of them.

You know something?  Dried Purell, reactivated by water, is slimy.  So yes, my spidey-sense in fact was correct, there was some Purell residue left on my hands.  Normally that’s ok – I’m assuming it is there still doing battle to protect me.  This time it is working against me.

I almost decided to just give up at that point and do glasses, but I don’t like failure and I figured I’d try one more thing.  With slimy yet still somewhat hygienic hands, I wiped them on an as-yet-unused (or so I chose to gamble) towel and then used the contact lens fluid to rinse them off one final time.  Contact lenses were put in and my eyes did not freak out.  At least at first.

One could argue that I’m a prime candidate for being a hypochondriac and perhaps there is some truth to that.  After about 2 minutes one of my eyes felt like something could be going wrong.  Is it the Purell still?  E. coli?  Who can be sure?  By this time I had moved on to other things, touching things, and so my hands were no longer sterile.  Taking the contact out is also still something best done with sterile hands.  What to do?  Let’s see if it is something I can flush out with eye drops… and that seemed to do it.  Although for the rest of the day I would be wondering if my eye sight was going cloudy in my left eye.

Or one of these babies was growing in the petri dish that used to be my eyeball.

Incidentally that evening taking the contact lenses out also entailed a similar set of perilous hand sanitizing procedures, and the next morning I decided to pack those suckers back in the suitcase and go for an all-glasses all-the-time Asian experience for the rest of my trip.