Several years ago while I was working at a local auto body shop, I had some personal health issues. Among those issues was this time when I was cutting some rusty metal off a customer's car. I was wearing the full safety gear (goggles, mask, gloves), but somehow a chunk of metal managed to find its way to my eyeball. I didn't know about it until the next morning when I woke up with what I thought was welder's flash.

Since I was having a really hard time seeing, I had my mom call my boss and tell him that I was in this situation and that I probably wouldn't be in that day. They somehow got into the details of the ordeal, and it was brought up that only my right eye was giving me fits. The boss, experienced as he was, told my mom that it probably wasn't welder's flash and that if it didn't go away within a couple of hours I would need to get in to see the eye doctor. That was one of the longest days of my life.

During the several hours that went past, I was sitting on the sofa in the basement, listening to the television. Why wasn't I watching it? Well, apparently my left eye started to feel bad for my right eye, and it began to swell and water, thus leaving me blind, a sensation like no other, which I do NOT want to experience again.

By about 2:30PM, Mom called the local eye doctor and was able to secure me an immediate appointment. The eye doctor knew full and well what to expect on both a best-case scenario and its counterpart, the worst-case scenario.

Upon arrival to the clinic, the optometrist put a colored eye drop in both of my eyes. This solution would "puddle" around any foreign objects, which would make them much easier to see on the scope. She first checked my left eye and found nothing. When she moved to the right eye though, she said I was a very lucky guy. She mentioned that had the chunk metal been just millimeters to the left, it would have been in my line of sight and would have left me somewhat impaired as a result. Not only that, but if I had waited longer the metal shard would have worked its way into my eyeball even deeper, which would have required emergency surgery at one of the nearby universities.

As we were finishing up at the clinic, the doctor mentioned that I would have a scar on my eyeball for the rest of my life, but it should not cause any issue in the long term.

This process repeated itself another 5 times over the course of that year, and they all resulted in the eye doctor telling me that I wasn't being truthful about wearing protective eye glasses or goggles (though I was). Each time though, I was just as lucky as the first: The damage was never in my line of sight.

Well, all of this changed just the other day. While it's just a minor issue, it is very annoying. As I was staring out the window of the airplane on my way to and from Las Vegas, I noticed this little black dot towards the bottom of my view that seemed to follow wherever I was looking. At first I thought it was probably just a speck of something in my eye, but on the return trip today it was confirmed.

I don't think this is going to cause any problems, since it's more of an annoyance than anything. It's just really weird though.