Colleen was at the park, pushing her baby in an insanely expensive stroller she could not afford, the day the world lost its color.

It happened gradually and it took her approximately an hour to realize she was seeing everything in shades of grey.

When it initially registered on her consciousness, she stood confused for a minute, uncertain what happened. She remembered she had some eye drops in her diaper bag. She took it off the handle of the stroller, unzipped the small pocket on the right side where she kept little things like a box of tic tac, packets of her lactase pills, eye drops, and some hair ties. She rummaged through the pocket for a brief moment before she finally found one of the preservative free, individually packaged eye drops she needed daily for excessively dry and itchy eyes.

She twisted the top and it came off without much effort. A little hole just bigger than a pin head opened and she squeezed the little tube to deposit a few drops of lubricant in her eyes, right first, then left.

While she performed this mundane yet necessary task, she kept her right hand on the handle of her baby stroller, in a tight grip.

She held her head tilted back to let the drops be absorbed by her mucous membranes. When she thought the fluid had been sufficiently absorbed, she blinked a few times, and lowered her head to look at the world, again.

Her vision was clearer. The eye drops always did that. They brought things into sharp focus, they got rid of the blurriness on the edges of her vision.

But the world was still in varying shades of grey.

Fear like she had never known existed clutched her heart. She swung around, both hands on the handlebar of her stroller now, gripping so tightly she felt pain shoot through her knuckles into her palms.

The trees in the park were varying shades of grey.

She pulled back the hood of her stroller to take a look at her son. His image was now so alarming, her weak pelvic floor gave way and urine leaked from her bladder, and trickled down her expensive joggers.

Fresh panic seized her as her heart rate doubled in an instant. Her iWatch buzzed. She looked down at it and it had an alert that her current heart rate was out of her resting range. She tapped the watch to dismiss the alert. She swallowed an uncomfortable lump that had formed in her throat and began to race home.