As primary-care eye doctors, we deal with pain. Pain can be a presenting symptom for any number of acute and chronic eye health conditions.

Of course, patients often expect instantaneous relief from pain they self-inflict through lazy contact lens wear and care, bare-eyed carpentry or gardening, and any number of silly, stupid, goofy and thoughtless decisions they make.

Well, maybe patients dont expect instantaneous relief. After all, they call you on Saturday for what they did to their eyes on Wednesday. For a patient, only one thing is more painful than metal shavings in the eye. What really hurts is calling your office during normal business hours. Thats painful.

I know something about pain. Last month, I began to feel like someone had driven a nail into my zygomatic arch. Since I have two kids who want to be dentists, I felt totally qualified to self-diagnose TMJ. After all, I had been told by a guy who knew a lady whose first husbands brothers second cousin worked in maintenance at a dental lab that if your jaw hurt in this particular area, it could be TMJ. So, I was certain that all I had to do was take the five-year-old muscle relaxants that my doctor had prescribed when I threw my back out lifting a suitcase.

I did feel much better, other than the visions. Oh, and the three big knots of unbelievable agony that still surrounded my back tooth. This reached a crisis stage when I couldnt eat a cookie without wincing. I called my dentist one Friday on his day off (as the patient handbook requires). He kindly called in antibiotics and saw me on Tuesday. (I was tied up Monday.) Yep, I needed a root canal. This wasnt so bad. It was not nearly as bad as the kidney stone that hit me the day after my root canal. No joke.

That Sunday morning, I woke up crying in the fetal position. Now, this is not unusual, but its typically related to tequila and Saturday night, not to the feeling of a gunshot wound in my lower back. My wife took control and told me we were going to the ER for pain meds. I blubbered, Can we wait until I stop blubbering? She wisely said, No. So, I blubbered over to the local ER, where the doctor gave me a syringe full of something that reminded me of how I felt one weekend as a freshman in college.

Things were seriously groovy as they diagnosed a kidney stone, my first in five years. The doctor recommended cranberry juice. The nurse gave me several party hat-looking things to try to catch the stone as it passed through. I considered my next move and decided to consult with a specialist, my cousins sisters brother, a car dealer who told me he heard from a friend of a dude who was in the coal mines when one of the bosses told him that his grandmothers hairdressers churchs choir directors father had told him to drink beer for kidney stones or was it for earaches? To me, this made more sense than cranberry juice.

So, you see, optometrists know how to deal with pain, often our own. Do we react that much differently than our patients do? Nah. We are very, very busy. Too busy to get our own eyes checked. Too busy to take our contact lenses out at night. Too busy to put on safety glasses. And, speaking from experience, too busy to have root canals and kidney stones.

Perhaps its human nature to procrastinate care in the face of pain. Perhaps WE are human. Could that be? Nah. We just know that pain might just go away if we hang in there long enough.