Time, death, baldness. Each of these things – and probably many others – has been referred to as “the great leveler.”

By the very nature of the phrase – note the “the” – there can be only one “great leveler.” And none of these things are it. The great leveler is … 

Pink eye.

Old and young, rich and poor, Mensa or moron, anyone with eyeballs and hands to rub them can succumb. And when you do, there’s only one path out, and it runs through a doctor’s office and a pharmacy.

My mistake, I now believe, was not buying everyone in the house a diving mask the moment the first of our four kids’ eyes started turning red. What better way to contain the eye goo and keep kids’ hands away from their peepers? 

The first case, in one of our 4-year-old twins, started out so mildly it was almost charming. For a couple hours, his big droopy eyes actually glistened like one of those “Precious Moments” figurines. But then the glistening graduated to goobers – our name for those rock-like dried deposits that cling to every eyelash and seal slumbering eyes shut.

Our timing was off. Usually we get horribly sick on the weekends, and our first pink-eye victim actually got it early enough that we got in to see our normal doctor on a Friday. A nurse practitioner with foresight told us to call with the first sign of its spread to our other kids, and she’d just phone in a prescription for more eye drops right away.

We did everything right. Lots of hand-washing. Separate towels. Minimal eyeball-to-eyeball contact, though who can stop kids from running into each other altogether. 

True to form the rest of our kids infected each other over the weekend, when foresight or no, there was no nurse practitioner to call. At the risk of unleashing a flood of letters to the editor, my first reaction was to share – very, very carefully – the prescription eye drops Kid No. 1 got until we could get subsequent kids in to the doctor.

But by Sunday morning, Kid No. 2, our 8-year-old daughter, had gone from pink eye to raging red eye, so we hit the urgent care center, where they know us by name after frequent night and weekend visits. This time we got ointment that you apply with a swab inside the lower eyelid.

Later in the day, Kid No. 3, our other twin, said his eyes were bothering him, and around dinnertime Kid No. 4, our 11-year-old, started to look a little glassy-eyed, and it wasn’t a result of a weekend’s worth of Star Wars: The Clone Wars episodes and Skittles ingestion. 

Try as I might to explain suppositories, my kids believe eye drops and ointment are the most diabolical methods to administer medicine ever created. And by the end of the weekend, we had three kids on medicine and one who was just a phone call away. The drops are given every four waking hours, generally four doses a day. The one who had the ointment got it three times daily. That meant 11 wrestling matches in a day, and despite the fact that I outweigh all three medicated munchkins put together, I’m out of shape and they’re all wigglers so it felt like my wife and I spent all our time and energy either chasing or pinning down our kids. The howling and crying was horrible, and that was just from me.

I actually came to doubt that there’s any medicine in the drops or ointment. I think they’re all placebos, and the idea is that their use causes so much crying that the pink eye gets flushed by tears. But, of course, I’m not a doctor.

We weren’t alone. Like a tornado or a naked, wet kid just out of the tub, it was easy to track this pink eye outbreak’s path of destruction. We saw every kid – and lots of the adults – around us with it before, at the same time or after. Despite our care, I’m sure my kids gave it to someone, just like I’m sure someone gave it to us.  

As I write this, I seem to have dodged the bullet, although one of my eyes is a little itchy, now that I think about it. Oh well, I’ve got four kids, one to hold down each limb while my wife gives me eye drops. I’m sure everyone but my wife would get a kick out of helping medicate me.

(Dave Bundy is editorial director for the Suburban Journals of Greater St. Louis. Reach him at dbundy@yourjournal.com or 314-744-5772.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 3:32 pm and is filed under Columnist Dave Bundy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.