One bad little bug!

On a normal hot summer's day when I was about four or five years old, I was playing in the backyard at my Aunt Arlene's house. As I was playing around in the bushes, I got something in my eye. It hurt something terrible and I kept rubbing and rubbing it and couldn't get it to stop hurting. I felt something big and a big bump right in the middle under my eyelid. I ran into the house to look in the mirror and screamed when I discovered some kind of small black bug that looked like a ladybug, round, but more like a beetle in color and hardness. My mother and aunt Arlene came running to see what was wrong and I was still screaming trying to get this bug off of and out of my eye. I was freaking out like when I'd see a spider. Jumping up and down, flinging my arms, freaking out like any child or adult would do when scared from a snake or spider. This little bug was clinging onto my pupil, right in the center of my eye. It covered my entire pupil, all you could see was the brown of my eyes. I must have rubbed it so much and hard that I embedded it into my eye somehow or it was just holding on with it's legs, that you couldn't see.

Mom and aunt Arlene laid me down on the bathroom counter and got out the tweezers and were doing their own surgery on my eye. I remember them trying to pour cold water into my eye and the chlorine in the water burned so bad. I was crying and screaming, kicking, and scared to death. They finally got the tweezers to grip onto the little creature and got it out of my eye.

I do not remember anything after that. But I am now blind in my left eye. What I do see, I see double and if I look out of my left eye for very long, it just blacks out. It starts as a little black circle and the darkness gets bigger and bigger until I cannot see a thing.

I oftentimes wish they would have done the appropriate thing and taken me straight to an emergency room. But would it have made any difference? Had I already done too much damage due to rubbing and rubbing it and trying to push, rub, and get it out of my own eye? Did they do damage with the tweezers? Or had the little bugger dug its little legs into my pupil doing it's own damage? Was it the hard, outer shell of the bug that causes me to see a black circle before everything blacks out?

I will never know the answers, but I remember it as if it was yesterday. When I asked my mother later in life when I was in my twenties, she told me that no such thing ever happened, that I must have dreamt it all. She says I was born that way. Was she in denial or feeling guilty for removing it on her own and not taking me to the hospital? Another answer I will never know, she is now deceased.

I remember later as a child being at my uncle's house where I was more or less raised. He took me into his arms, we were in the front yard. He told me to close my eyes and then walked me to a different place in the yard. It was actually the back side of the house. There's school grounds behind his two and a half acre fenced-in yard that was filled with almost a hundred bright yellow school buses. He told me to keep my right eye covered with my hand and to open my left eye and asked me where we were in the yard. I opened my left eye and could see nothing but a big black circle. I couldn't focus or tell where I was at all. That is when we discovered I was legally blind in my left eye. I must have been six or seven years old by then.

They had taken me to numerous eye doctors and they all told us that we had to wait until I was older to get it fixed. That I had a "lazy eye". But when I grew older, the doctors said it should have been fixed when I was younger. It was a no-win situation from the day it happened.

Did I really dream this or did the bug really cause the blindness in my left eye? I will never know. But I would bet a lot of money that it really happened. A four or five year old child remembers something so scary and so real. I will never forget the feeling of that round, hard shell in my eye and how I felt it with my finger under my eyelid. I'll always remember the hard marble counter they laid me on in the bathroom and the bright lights above as they leaned over me doing their own surgery on me. I still get chills and freaked out feelings when I think of that little bug implanting itself in my pupil.