EYE HERPES!!!

So, this was quite the ordeal for me. I have joked a couple of times that karma's a bitch. Through Nursing school I have always joked around about some of the nastier illnesses. Eye herpes in particular fascinated me because first of all, it looked awful. Second of all, HOW on earth do you contract it? Lookin for love in all the wrong places? Lookin for love in the RIGHT places?

So, fast forward to me working in an ICU. Doing what ICU nurses do at night. Was helping my friend bathe her patient who was comatose. He had a lot of secretions so I suctioned his trach and his mouth. You see where this is going, don't you? I was disconnecting the suction thing from the tubing and a bunch of drops of his bloody saliva somehow jump right behind my glasses and INTO MY EYE.

I froze for a second and then turned the faucet on and stuck my head under it. I heard my friend, in the background, say "Oh my God, he has herpes lesions in his mouth!". I tried to figure this out in a distant and academic way inside my head before I said anything. I mean, he wasn't in the hospital for infectious disease or anything. Ugh, I gagged as all those horrible images came flooding back into my head from nursing school. Crusted over bloody eyes. Zombie looking shit, yo.

So I went to my charge nurse and explained that I got oral secretions in my eye. She asked if I wanted to be seen by employee health (which means since it was after hours I'd be going to the ER). I blinked and told her the guy had herpes lesions in his mouth. She said "yeah, you should go".

I went down, stopping to text my husband, "Im going to the ER, I'm afraid I may have gotten herpes from my patient". He was confused by this and then for the rest of the time I was waiting my phone wasn't in range. Oops. That is probably the one text I've ever sent that provoked the most questions from the fewest words.

So, in short, they do NOTHING. They wanted to draw my blood to make sure I didn't have HIV and Hepatitis. Which, I don't get, but oh well... And they drew his blood to see if he had HIV and Hepatitis. Then they said to follow up with the real employee health in the morning. (I went and they had me fill out more paperwork, no info on what I should do to PREVENT MY EYE FROM CRUSTING OVER AND FALLING OUT).

I had to work the next night and was freaking out at not getting any answers. I called my primary care doctor. She said she had no idea how to care for eye herpes, and asked if I had an opthalmologist. I said no. She said to go back to work in the evening like normal and talk to the Opthalmologist on call and ask for a script - if they weren't comfortable writing me one, I could call back and she would write whatever that person said to write. UGH. By this point I'd also been googling furiously and looking stuff up in my old nursing texts.

Finally went back to work and talked to the Opthalmology resident. She listened to my story and was the first person I talked to who didn't seem confused about what I wanted or why I was concerned. Yay!! She then said, "well, that's really gross. We don't usually do prophylaxis for this, but if it were MY eye, here's what I would do...." and even called in a script for me! Yesss!

So - end result - happily ever after. Never progressed into eye herpes. My coworkers were appropriately fucking awesome and joked with me for the next few weeks about "Hey, there's something in your eye....", and I got plenty of "lookin' for love in all the wrong places" jokes. I could not have asked for anything better. Except, WTF employee health? Yes, you should make sure the guy didn't have HIV and Hepatitis. But I'm disturbed by how much I was blown off, overall.