It hasn't exactly been a banner couple of weeks for me. You already read about the blasted poison ivy. Then, on Sunday, my eyes started itching...which had me fearful that I had poison ivy in my eye (UGH!) but I decided to chalk it up to allergies and move along. My strategy worked quite nicely until Monday afternoon during our staff meeting, when a shooting stabbing pain ran through my eye. It subsided after a few minutes but came back with avengance on Tuesday morning. This was lovely timing. We had a vendor in to kick off a new project - all day Tuesday and until noon on Wednesday. I must say that I truly enjoyed spending nearly 2 days in a very stuffy, warm conference room, eye dripping, twitching, and ultimately aching while I tried to stay awake listening to this damn kick-off. I even resorted to sneaking out during our "sort of" working lunch and buying eye drops but, alas, the damn eye would have none of it.
I broke down and called my doctor - I am not a huge fan of doctors, what with my overwhelming fear of pending death - to get in to see what the hell was going on. I was convinced that I either had eye cancer (is there such a thing?), poison ivy of the eye, or a cold sore in my eye (since hubby was sporting one on my lip and he is notorious for kissing my eye - don't ask, I don't get it, and no, it does not thrill me in any way!). <-- As you can see, I have some hypochondria issues.
Needless to say, the GP (one in the practice I don't think I'd seen before, who had a bandaid on his forehead that I found simultaneously disconcerting and extraordinarily distracting), took a look at my eye and proclaimed that I was having a "pretty nasty allergic reaction" to something in the air. Apparently, my eye was quite swollen which was causing my eye to tear up due to a malfunctioning tear duct. It was also causing the sensation of my having a large shard of glass in the corner of my eye. That was a very enjoyable sensation, particularly when we were out to dinner on Tuesday night to celebrate G's last day of second grade. Nothing makes you feel like a shitty parent like feeling like complete crap and wanting to crawl in a hole and die during some sort of special event for your child. SIGH.
GP prescribed a nice little steroid to be applied directly to the eye for a period of 3 days, after which he assured me I'd be better "or call us back if you start getting green discharge". How comforting. The one cool part in all of this that, since my last trip to my GP (which was about 2 years ago and, in classic Andrea fashion, for my 2930830483098th bout of cryptic tonsils - gosh I love having deformed body parts, my cryptic tonsils being signficantly more of a scourge than my misshapen and totally deaf ear)...they have gone entirely wireless. Each GP and each nurse carries a laptop (notepad style) into which they put notes and from which they can route scripts directly to the pharmacy of your choice - thereby reducing the wait time once you get to said pharmacy (to 10 minutes in my case - 10 minutes to stick the label on the pre-packaged eye drops?!?!). Pretty damn cool. I wish we had that at my work - I could fire off sarcastic emails about my inept cube neighbor from anywhere in the building. LOL.
Needless to say, I found the drops to work almost from dose 1, although the stickiness level of them was a little disconcerting. Really...the sticky white glop that got stuck in the corner of my eye was helping? I wondered and so removed it as soon as I saw it...mistake I think...
Thursday things went much better but then Friday morning I woke up to a once again achy eye. Uh oh, I thought. Relapse? Eye cancer? Pink eye? What the hell was going on?
Luckily, it was a scheduled day off, a rareity for me, but G was in the weird no-man's land between the end of school and the start of camp, and I'd promised him a trip to the beach pending good weather (80-ish and clear skies qualifies), so off me and my swollen face and achy eye went. My parents gave me the requisite pep talk about waiting for the medicine to work and my mom, who has been plagued by allergic reactions my entire life (and apparently not before, she indicated Friday - damn, pregnancy messed with her too...I feel slightly guilty!), reminded me that I must leave said white stickiness IN my eye once I put the drop in so the medicine actually stays there.
So I did. And off we went to the beach (where I didn't apply quite enough sunscreen and hence have been blessed today with an oddly patchy sunburn - not horrible but enough to be annoying and make me look like a complete ass - thankfully it's confined to the stomach and, being that I am not 14, I am not sporting a belly shirt...but why oh why can I manage to fuck up sunscreen on myself like this - every summer?!?!?).
And suddenly, as we sat in totally unexpected 3:45pm traffic on Rte 9 (do people work?!?!?)...it dawned on me. My eye didn't ache. My face didn't feel swollen.
It's amazing what 3 hours of low tide exploring, minimal people around you, bright sunshine and salt air can do for your body - and your psyche.
Now once the striped sunburn goes away (hopefully tomorrow), perhaps my "decrepid" (G's decription, not mine), aging body can return to status quo - you know, the occasional IBS-driven gut ache, hormonally-induced headache, and overall exercise-lacking malaise and THAT'S IT. Please?
Good grief.
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