Do not trivialize the impact of getting (toxic, all natural, highly potent) soap in your eyes. It may not seem like a blatantly obvious essay topic, but if your eye has ever fallen victim to an unintentionally misdirected assault of soap, you would commiserate.

I had meant to do a quick face wash before I drove my daughter to school this morning. I have been adjusting (rather slowly) to my new master bathroom and was using my newly purchased, vintage style soap dispenser. With a white porcelain bottom, it has a stainless steel top which mimics a lever on top of a well. In order to dispense the soap, you have to make little pumps and it squirts out. Until this morning’s stealth soap attack, I had been enjoying my interaction with this nostalgic apparatus. 

“I hate this soap dispenser!” I yelled as I grasped at my right eye. An entire squirt’s worth assaulted my eye and the sting came on within two seconds and started intensifying no matter how much I was irrigating it with water. My eye burned like it was overtaken by a whole raw onion shoved under the lid. 

I continued to flush my eye alternating between cold and warm water, stopping periodically to assess my pain level. I stared at my reflection in the mirror, barely able to keep my eye open as it teared profusely. 

Just last month we had taken my daughter to the emergency room for an eye problem, which was never properly diagnosed and ended up resolving itself on its own like I had predicted. At the hospital, they flushed her eye using a saline solution from an IV bag. As the nurse directed a steady stream aimed at the white of my daughter’s eye, I held her eye open and distracted her by singing Hamilton as the nurse stood, unfazed, utterly unempathetic, acting annoyed we were disrupting her emergency room with our petty eye problems.

The next day, we visited an ophthalmologist, and the eye doctor explained to my daughter the cornea consists of a lot of sensitive nerves, the highest number of nerve fibres than any other body part! This precise moment of explanation is what I zap back to as I am cleaning my eye, trying not to rub it because it feels like razors are acting like windshield washers on my eyes.