Paranoia is a Survival Skill
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.
American Germaphobe India Saga (part 11)
This is an ongoing true story (that starts here) of a work trip to India where I, a spoiled, frightened, American germaphobe, desperately cling to my waning sanity by finding humor in the fear.
In the last article I discovered several physical manifestations worthy of alarm even though I have been vigilant against the many threats to my wellbeing.
Unfortunately, however, I am sometimes my own worst enemy.
USE WITH CAUTION
Monday I started the week at the office wearing my contact lenses. I had not worn them on the plane because I’d be wearing them for too long in dry- and nasty-air environments and didn’t want to wake up blind in Bangalore. Monday seemed like a good day to go back to them.
I should state for the record that I’m not what you’d call an “experienced” contact lens wearer. In fact, I’ve probably had these suckers no more than a couple of weeks and they are my first contact lenses — ever. I had finally set aside my fear of sticking things onto my eyeballs because after 20 years I’d pretty much had it with glasses getting smudged, dusty, eyelashed, sweaty, and all-too-often prone to getting accidentally swatted off my face by my own panicky flailing left hand trying to swat away the disease-carrying mosquitoes flying around in the Bangalore airport restroom whilst standing captive at the urinal using my right hand to protect my clothing from becoming defiled, and waiting with increasing impatience for certain biological processes to sufficiently conclude so that I could zip up and flee the clouds of insects and foul-smelling clouds of funk which seem attracted to me like vultures to a road kill.
And yes… true story. And YES I cleaned the glasses with soap. (At least I choose to believe that was soap.)
Now, one of the most important things you learn 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 doesn’t belong there. One of the practices I was strongly 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 definitely before poking them into my eyeballs.
For the past couple of weeks, this has served me well.
Then I flew to Bangalore.
Here, the water is suspect. Very suspect.
So, what can I do? How can I confidently ensure that my hands are microbe-free?
Fortunately Gojo Industries anticipated my needs back in 1988: Purell Hand Sanitizer! It was the first thing I threw into my suitcase for this trip.
SMART LIKE A CHICKEN
Arrogantly proud that I am so smart and resourceful, I throw a healthy dollop of Purell anti-life-form hand cleanser on my hands and rub that stuff in like a bully teaching those little punks a lesson. Then, as is intended by nature and as I’m pretty sure God would have commanded had there been a third stone tablet, I start waving my hands around in the air so that I can get the Purell after-glow to evaporate from my properly sanitized and sanctified hands.
If anyone had been able to peek inside my hotel room, they would have observed what looked to be an overweight American man trying in vain to fly around his hotel room like a frightened chicken with clipped wings.
Ok, so with hands properly purified, I head back to the contact lens paraphernalia. I reach down to get one of those suckers on a finger and a thought pops into my oh-so-smart brain: hold on there, Mr. Clean Fingers, let’s think about this.
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 safely dump that into my eye? Do I want to? My bottled water 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 a little bit of my precious 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 was in fact correct: there was indeed some Purell residue left on my hands. Normally that’s ok — I assume it is there to protect me, conducting ongoing post-invasion police actions to quell potential microbial uprisings. But this time it is working against me.
I almost decided to just give up at that point and fall back to wearing 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 my fingers off one final time. Confident of my new (and as-yet-untested) procedure, I proceeded to put my contact lenses in.
A minute passes and my eyes are not freaking out. This is good, but now I’m stuck wondering: how long do I wait to ensure all is ok before heading out to the office? I don’t want to be caught suddenly blinded while walking along these busy, dirty roadsides on walkways that are safely navigated only with steel-toed boots, a hard hat, safety goggles, leather armor and an OSHA-certified biohazard suit offering protection level A.
One could argue that I’m a prime candidate for being a hypochondriac and perhaps there is some truth to that. But I’ve got a bit of wisdom for you:
The paranoid stand justified on the graves of the optimistic.
After about 2 minutes one of my eyes felt like something could be going wrong. Is it the Purell? E. coli? Or worse — maybe one of the suspicious black mystery particles that every now and then emanate from the hotel room’s air vent?
By this time I had moved on to other things, getting ready to leave, which included touching all sorts of things, and so my hands were no longer sterile. Taking the contact out is also something best done with sterile hands. What to do?
Eye drops!
At this point I’m on the edge of panic because if this doesn’t work, I’m going to have to go through my 15-step sterilization procedure all over again while my eyeball is rotting, my eyesight is fading, and my odds of ever watching another Stargate SG1 rerun are falling faster than my appetite when invited to a Bangalore lunch.
Fortunately, the eye drops combined with an excessive amount of blinking seemed to do it. I’m saved!
SCIENTIFIC METHOD, DON’T FAIL ME NOW
The rest of the day goes by incident-free, although not without consequence. All day I am constantly distracted as I keep thinking that maybe my left eye’s eyesight is growing worse than my right one. Is my eyesight getting cloudy? It might be but the cloudy part is so faint and subtle that it is hard to be sure. Perhaps it is a smudge on the contact? Or maybe my cornea is being slowly consumed by a flock of hungry bacterium?
I gotta tell you, it takes a lot of skill to avoid notice during all-day meetings when you are constantly trying to covertly hold a hand over the right eye while finding various shapes, colors and lights to stare at with the left, trying to gauge whether the eyesight anomaly is getting worse throughout the day.
As you might expect, my evening also requires a similar set of perilous hand sanitizing procedures in order to extract the contacts. I decide, rather wisely I think, 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.
I will just have to try and be more careful in the bathrooms.
My first visit to Bangalore is nearing its end. What’s left is one more dinner at the hotel, one more day at the office, and a flight out. Not to home and safety and comfort, but to some place even more exotic than Bangalore. As you might expect, all does not go exactly as planned…
