andrea goes to the ER

Or...this--this!--is what you get for cleaning.

Okay. I am hereby self-nominating for a Darwin Award. Yes, I was determined to get that range hood cleaner than I had hereforto been able to, now that I had carefully examined how truly disgusting it was. So I went to the Home Depot and in the cleaning product aisle, I found me some super-powerful orange/citrus degreaser in a spray bottle, as I may have mentioned.

Tuesday evening after dinner I decided to work on this little project. I covered my stove with a thick towel, because there were all kinds of warnings on the product about what materials you shouldn't use it on, including stainless steel. I was working away, spraying and wiping and spraying and wiping, and I decided to try to get in around the fan which is the part I cannot reach (and honestly shouldn't even be able to see, but I've got a piece missing out of that hood, so I can see up there and it's gross.) So I sprayed up there and let it sit for a few minutes, and then figuring it had done as much degreasing as it was going to do and had dripped down as much as it was going to drip, I leaned myself backwards on top of the stove with my rag to try to wipe up in there. And as I was doing that, a huge drop of this toxic chemical plopped down into my left eye.

Holy fucking shit. It burned. And my kitchen sink had a full bucket of Mr Clean water in it which at that point I couldn't see to move, and my dad of course was in the downstairs bathroom, so I went tearing up the stairs to my bathroom and flushed my eye with water from the sink over and over until I could kind of see what I was doing, at which point I stuck my head into the bathtub and started flushing my eye directly with the handheld shower. After a long, long time of doing that, the burning in my eye stopped, and I could kind of see, though somewhat blurrily from that eye. It was bright red. I went downstairs to look at the bottle of degreaser, where it told me in case of eye exposure, I should flush with water for at least 15 minutes, then SEEK IMMEDIATE MEDICAL ATTENTION. Oh, shit, I thought, I guess that means I ought to go to the ER before I wake up blind in my left eye tomorrow.

So I did. Whereupon they put me in "fast track" which, as I like to point out, ain't so fucking fast. And the hell with HIPAA. I can tell you what every other patient in there had wrong with them, their first and most of their last names, what they all do for a living, and what the disposition of their ailments were. I also had my eye professionally flushed by a nice, gruff, ponytailed older male nurse, who I will bet you any amount of money was a Vietnam medic. Professional eye flushing involves them putting a giant contact lenses thingy attached to an IV line under your eye lid and hanging you over a sink while torrents of sterile water flood your face. In my case, it turned into a comedy of errors when the lenses thingy would not *stay* under my eyelid and various people tried to fix it in my nurse's absence. And then, all flushed and reassured I was going to be fine and all ready to go home, I waited another hour or maybe more while they tried to find some eye antibiotics for me (and the guy a few booths over with the big pickup-basketball-game cornea scratch, who incidentally looked just like Lawrence Fishburn). It seems there's a shortage of eye antibiotics in the hospital. What me and Mr Faux Fishburne got is apparently their 6th-line choice, the top five all being out of stock.

Anyway. Moral of the story: cleaning can only lead to no good. Also, there were no TVs in fast track, so I only got to listen to the Red Sox game when they took me over to the other side of the ER for my eye flushing. If they send me a customer service form in the mail, I'ma complain about that.

xoxo