DON'T EVER WASH YOUR CONTACTS WITH PLAIN WATER!!!

For those who don't know, my 14 year old son woke up Wednesday morning about 4 PM with a terrible pain in his eye. He had complained about it the day before, but we just figured it was irritated from last Thursday when his eyes dried up and his contact popped out at school. I took him to the eye doctor yesterday morning and it turned out that he has a Cornea Ulcer, which was caused from the day at school when he didn't have any contact solution and washed his lense with water before popping it back in. Washing his lense with water was not a good choice, but he didn't realize what could happen (neither did I). Washing the lense with water does not cleanse the lense, but instead the lense picks up and holds on to little micro-organisms (not just in the water, but from your hands too... even if you've washed them thoroughly as he does) and once placed back in the eye, those little organisms go right to work and form a 'cancer-like' condition called a Cornea Ulcer. Most cornea ulcers afix themselves to the side, but in my sons case, it affixed right over the center, which is what made it so dangerous. The doctor prescribed 2 types of antibiotic drops for his eyes, one to be applied ON the hour and the other to be applied on the HALF hour... so every half hour, for 24 hours, a drop of one or the other was placed in his eye. I was up all night and every half hour I went in and woke him up enough to put the drops in. Today, we went back to the eye doctor (24 hours later) and everything looks to be fine now, as it looks like we caught it time. The eye doctor said that if he hadn't seen it himself yesterday, he wouldn't believe the progress we made in 24 hours. Only a small speck remained and it is unlikely that there will be any permanent damage or even a scar! Our family is tired, but relieved that it looks like it was caught in time to prevent permanent damage. Please keep him in your prayers. He's only 14 and is my 'baby', so this was very scary. The worst appears to be over, but not over completely. The doctor himself was still worried enough that he gave me his home number and cell number (they're not going to be in the office again until Tuesday). We'll know Tuesday for sure what damage, if any, there will be. Meanwhile, we now continue with the drops, but will get to spread the time out between drops a bit. Today we kept doing the drops every hour, tonight will be every 2 hours, tomorrow every 3 hours, and by Saturday we won't have to do it at night anymore and can spread the drops out so that he gets 6 drops during the normal 'awake' time. Whew!!!