The Pink Eye That Wasn't

It had been one of those days of non-stop failures. Or that’s what it felt like anyway. Though it was a Saturday, so we got to sleep in. But pretty much everything after that was a fail. 

First, I missed a coffee date with a friend because I had accidentally left my phone on silent. 

Then, I dropped off Tess at a birthday party WITHOUT a gift.

That afternoon, when Tighe tried to return a fairly large appliance, Walmart wouldn’t accept it.

And then there’s the cluster of Nate’s new Apple watch. Tighe wasn’t able to activate it without the IMEI number, but he couldn’t fetch the number without activating the watch. Then the activation fee and monthly charge were going to be much more expensive than the original quote, but when he went to return the watch altogether, the store wouldn’t accept it.

And finally, Target didn’t have the tiny Lego mini-figure that Tess had been saving up for. Which was so trivial, but it just felt like icing on the proverbial cake at this point. But it was a gross cake. Gluten-free. And the icing didn’t even have sugar. 

Later, Tighe described the day as “a lot of busy work with nothing to show for it.” The satisfaction one usually gets from crossing items off a to-do list was totally absent. By three o’clock, we’d accomplished very little aside from a load of laundry and a growing pile of dishes in the kitchen sink.

At some point in that Day of Defeat, I noticed that Sam’s right eye was slightly bloodshot. And the skin around it was pink.

“Sam, does your eye itch? Or hurt?” 

“No, why?” At which point he immediately started rubbing his eyelid.

“Don’t touch it! Tighe, does this look like pink eye?”

“Yeah, it does.” Tighe replied, barely looking up from one of his three computer screens. 

I’ve been crying Pink Eye Wolf since Nate was two weeks old and he had a clogged tear duct, causing that classic conjunctivitis gunk in one eye. Since that day eleven years ago, I’ve asked Tighe at least once a month if he thought [insert kid’s name] had pink eye. And Tighe always says no and he’s always been right. In fact, in eleven years of parenting eight different eyeballs, we’ve only had pink eye one time.

So when Tighe certified my pink eye suspicion on that Sinking Ship Saturday, I knew it had to be true. I didn’t want it circulating through the house, I didn’t want it to ruin our upcoming travel plans, and I really didn’t want to cancel Sam’s sleepover scheduled for that night. 

I texted the doctor and asked her if she could call in a prescription. Which she did within the hour. I waited about thirty minutes, set Tess and Lou up with a snack, and headed to the pharmacy.

“We don’t have any record of that prescription,” the clerk told me, “but you can check back on Monday.”

“Monday?” I whined. “But we’re leaving town.”

“Yeah, sometimes it takes doctors’ offices a little longer on the weekends.”

“But the doctor called it in herself.” I pleaded.

The elderly man behind me was leaning on his tiny grocery cart, shifting uncomfortably from one leg to the other. I sensed he was in pain—his audible grunts were either passive-aggressive or totally authentic, and either way, they made me feel guilty and entitled—so I stepped away from the counter. 

I texted the doctor that they didn’t have a record of the prescription and asked if there was an over-the-counter option we could try in the meantime.

“That means they just haven’t listened to their voicemails,” she texted back. “Try again in a few minutes.”

I meandered through the store and gathered a handful of other items we kind of needed. Maybe I could salvage this Sorrowful Saturday and make it semi-productive after all.

By the time I returned to the prescription pick-up line, there were five or six people ahead of me. 

So I waited. Patiently. 

I texted my neighbor, a nurse, to ask if she had any extra pink eye drops in her medicine cabinet. She has quite the medical arsenal. You need gauze, she’s got gauze. Amoxicillin, she’s got it. Butterfly stitches, definitely. Defibrillator, probably. But she might bill your insurance for that last one.

“Who has pink eye?” she wrote back.

“Sam.”

“Then why is he at my house??” 

Because I’m at CVS and Tighe didn’t think to quarantine him, I thought to myself. 

When I arrived at the front of the line again, I explained the situation and told a different clerk that I’d just texted the doctor and she confirmed that the measly little eye drops should be in their system.

She tapped away on her computer and pulled it right up.

“What’s his date of birth?” she called to me.

I told her.

She frowned, clearly puzzled, and turned back to the screen.

“What’s his date of birth again?”

I repeated his numerical birthdate. Slower this time. Then repeated it to myself in my head, just to confirm. Was I wrong? Did I mix up the kids’ birth years or something? But no, some quick subtraction told me that I was correct.

“That’s not what we have on file. The insurance company has something different.”

“Um… does Sam not exist?”

I realize that’s not exactly the verdict she was relaying to me, but wouldn’t that be fitting? That insurance companies don’t recognize Sam? Sam of all people. Somehow he thwarted the system. He’s off-grid. Does the federal government even know about him?

“It looks like just a typo. Someone at the insurance company must have typed the digits backwards—they’re just flipped. But they won’t cover this, you’ll have to pay out of pocket today. And then you’ll have to call the insurance company, correct the date in the system, and have them reimburse you.”

“Okay,” I sighed. Another bust on today’s scoreboard. “How much will it be?”

“Fifty-three dollars,” she reported back. Not exactly enough to ruin our credit or anything, but way more than it would have been with insurance.

“It’ll probably take another ten to fifteen minutes,” she told me.

I took my other toiletry items to the front register and paid for them. Then I called Tighe.

“Sam’s off-grid. He’s not even in the system,” I reported.

“What?” he said. He was still irritated from his Day of Defeat. 

I told him what happened.

“So why didn’t you just tell him that the other date was his birthday? That you misspoke.”

Silence. Gee, why didn’t I think of lying? To big pharma, the most powerful entity in the entire world. Also, that feels like insurance fraud.

Just then I got a text that his eye drops were ready.

I went back to the counter, ready to be done with the pharmacy. The clerk looked at me like she’d never seen me before, and when she asked for Sam’s birthdate, I hesitated. The real one? Or the fake one? 

I guessed real and I was right. 

She turned back to rifle through the big basket stuffed to the brim with little white pharmacy bags each with their own little vials of poison or medicine or drugs or placebos or whatever. 

“Hmm,” she muttered, still flipping through the white bags, checking each one for Sam’s initials. She reached the bottom of the basket and then moved it to reach a second basket beneath the first, also filled with white bags. Finally, at the bottom of the second red basket, literally the last white bag in the whole pharmacy, was the little bottle of Sam’s eye drops. 

Which meant… it had been ready this whole time? I’ve been wandering around aimlessly, like Sam in the insurance company’s system, for thirty minutes and his eye drops have just been sitting in a basket on the floor there?

When I got home a few minutes later, I unpacked the $53 eye drops and began pulling ingredients for dinner from the fridge. I peeked at my phone and had a text from my Neighbor Nurse.

“I don’t think it looks like pink eye. Might just be spring allergies. Or maybe Lou poked him in the eye.”

Checkmate, Saturday of Exasperation.

“Well then, send him home so I can give him his $53 eye drops for absolutely no reason,” I typed back.

If I accomplished nothing else on that day, I successfully administered a round of eye drops. And poor Sam hated every second. 

UPDATE #1. Nope, not pink eye. Three days and only three rounds of successful eye drops later, and his eye is totally fine. Setback Saturday strikes again.

UPDATE #2: Nate spent the night at a friend’s house that night and we found out the friend he shared a bed with was home vomiting all day on Sunday. It turned out to be a food allergy, thus not contagious. What a relief. 

UPDATE #3. On the day I’ll call “Winning Wednesday,” the insurance company agreed to reimburse us for the drops.

UPDATE #4: Upon arrival in Florida for Easter a few days later, we found that my niece was throwing up and my nephew had a double ear infection. So after all that trouble to fend off illness before our trip, we ended up walking right into it.