What is That?!

The Nursing Home room was dimly lit. The old lady yelled, “There is it! That’s my eye!” The student Tech shivered all over. Not thinking, she had picked up a plastic brown eyeball with her surgical-gloved hands after she had helped the owner, an elderly black lady, bend over to move from the bed to the wheelchair. The young Tech quickly threw it down. Gross!

The old woman yelled, “Hey, pick it up. Be careful, Know how expensive my eye is?” The Tech looked down, grossed out, to keep from stepping on it and left refusing, “No way. No way!” It was her first day of work in this Nursing Home and she could have sworn that she heard that old lady laughing out loud as she left. Not funny! Being new, the young Tech was later encouraged as well as tactfully reprimanded.

In time the old lady and the Tech became friends. The black lady had been diagnosed with an eye problem, had surgery but she eventually lost her eye. An eye transplant was next, but her brown eye was replaced with a blue eye. She then had a black eye and a light blue one. The old lady told the Tech, “It gave me the “heebie jeebies. It was like some old white woman’s eye was looking at me.” The doctor remedied that problem with a dark brown contact to cover that blue eye. Eventually the eye had to be removed and was replaced with a brown plastic eye that would fall out of its socket when the old lady would lean over too far which brings us back to the beginning of this story.