The Sunscreen/Eyeball Incident

Today, my BFF and I ventured to Valleyfair where we met up with some of her friends and their friends for a fun-filled day of nauseating thrill and water rides. For those of you who are not in the know, Valleyfair is an amusement and water park. It's not the largest or most impressive amusement park out there, but it's decent, and we ended up having a really good time. The worst part of the day wasn't having to leave at 4:30 pm so the person who drove could return to their dog before it peed on the floor or walking around in water socks all day. It was the painful combination of sunscreen and my eyes.

Being very white and very bald, I depend on sunscreen with high SPFs to save me from the harmful rays of the sun. Today, I applied an SPF 40 sunscreen to my body and head, and it wasn't long before my right eye started burning. My assumption is that the sunscreen I applied to my head mingled with my sweat and dripped down into my eye. I didn't think it would last long, what with my eye watering and me blinking incessantly, but last a long time it did.

I was in line for the Steel Venom (see Steel Venom Details), one wild roller coaster that shoots you forward and backward several times, when the burning started. Not wanting to leave the line, I tried my best to not rub my eye and smear even more sunscreen into it. I pushed through the pain, rode the ride, and then found a drinking fountain to rinse out my eye. It felt a little better for a few minutes, but then both of my eyes began burning.

Eventually, I left everyone in line at a water ride to go and find another water fountain to soothe my reddened, watering eyes. As it turns out, Valleyfair is going green by having very, very few water fountains in their park, and I was unable to find one. It was horrible. I couldn't keep my eyes open for more than a second at a time, and it felt like someone was stabbing pencils into my eyes. I stumbled around for five minutes until I found a bathroom and was able to rinse out my eyes at a sink. I rinsed and I rinsed, but my rinsing didn't work. Defeated, I set out--almost completely blind--to find the First Aid station.

With the aid of a kind girl who was manning a carnival game, I was able to find the First Aid building, and the blessed woman stationed there guided me to an eye washing station.

While I was undergoing the horrible procedure of trying to keep my eyes open with cold water shooting into them, a few people came into the First Aid Station. First came a little girl and her mother. The little girl had been riding a ride when it jerked, as amusement park rides tend to do, and she smashed her face into something. The poor thing had a large, swollen bruise underneath her eye and she was doing her best not to cry. The other person who came into the station was a female worker. She hadn't been feeling the greatest for the past couple of days and had puked at her work station.

After what felt like several days of rinsing my eyes, I set out to meet up with everyone. My eyes were feeling a lot better and I could actually keep them open. They hurt for the rest of the day, but I was able to see. I suppose the bright side to that is that we now know that this specific sunscreen really is waterproof.

Other than the sunscreen/eyeball incident, it was a pretty good day. We went to a candy store afterwards and I bought a little Wii remote that dispenses little candies, much like a Pez dispenser, for only $1.69. It may have been the best $1.69 I've ever spent.