I had a similar experience: I was on a small cruise ship and went on deck at midnight to watch the ship sail when a handsome young Italian officer approached and started talking to me. All of a sudden I felt excruiating pain and burning in my right eye. I started screaming and running for the nearest ladies room (difficult enough to find on a ship with two good eyes!)desperate for a mirror to get the “thing” out of my eye. When I burst into the ladies room, there were a bunch of older ladies there and all were shocked to see a sobbing girl with a ship’s officer in hot pursuit run into ladies room! Imagine what they thought…….

Anyway, I could not even open the eye and was escorted to my cabin where my sister, who had already gone to bed, pried open my eye and took her fingernail and scraped a huge piece of tar from the inside of my upper lid. Apparently the hot tar blew into my eye when the smokestack was sounded.

The next morning I couldn’t open my eye and visited the ship’s doctor who proceeded to tell me that there was nothing in my eye but eyelashes, apparently prepared to deny injury in case of a law suit. I had a scratched cornea and had to wear dark glasses night and day and could not submerge my head at all(lot’s of fun in the Carribbean). So I ended my week without swimming, snorkeling, with a blood-red eye nearly swollen shut and becoming the talk of both the dowagers and the ship’s crew. Fun times.

Then there is the time I was robbed at machete point in Jamaica or the time we were witness to a serious head-on collision between tourists and locals in a remote and deserted road near West End on Grand Bahama Island. Fortunately I was not injured in Jamaica though I cannot recommend visiting jails in third world countries (or EVER visiting Jamaica). And fortunately the guy driving our car on Grand Bahama had a pocket knife and the forethought to cut out a seat belt and was able to make a tourniquet for the cab driver who had a damaged artery in his left leg. Almost forgot about the taptap buses in Haiti and Baby Doc’s minions who tried to rob my sister and I in Port Au Prince. I could go on and on – makes me wonder why I ever travel.