falling apart

It's general knowledge that my earthly body is pretty much falling apart. At 17, I was told that several of the lower discs in my spine were degenerating, and in the fifteen years since, they've obviously only gotten worse for the wear. Literally. Add three pregnancies, LOTS of weight gain in said pregnancies, and some bursitis in the hips for good measure, and there you have me. Hot, right? Yeah, so I've resigned myself to the fact that I'll never have the flexibility levels needed to join Cirque de Soleil, but I thought that for the most part the rest of me was okay.

Especially my eyes. Yeah, I wear contacts or glasses, but hey lots of people do. My eyes are actually a feature of my physical appearance that I like. Until the other night. After putting the menagerie three kids to bed, I sat down at the computer in my usual nightly fashion. While looking up at the monitor, I was suddenly struck with the realization that my right eye hurt. Really hurt. Like someone was stabbing me in the eyelid. Now, I'm no wuss when it comes to pain (hey, I pushed out a ten pound baby without any medicinal assistance), but this was intense and seemed to come out of nowhere. I call over lovely husband to ask him, and he says, "Yeah, you have a little bump."

Little bump?? I go to look at in the mirror and it's more like a miniature molehill growing on my lower lid. What the heck?! So, I figure I better find some medical advice to guide me in caring for this problem. Google it is. I look up eye stye and find out: A stye is a small abscess of the glands in the eyelids (near the root of an eyelash) which can occur externally and internally. It is an infection of the hair follicle of an eyelash.

Oh, for the love. Abcessed eyelid glands? Infected eyelash follicle? I just do not have time for this. The only real advice I could find that I could do immediately was to put a hot compress on it. That I did while we watched a movie. (Watching Pirates of the Caribbean with only one eye made me feel authentically pirate-like.) Then it was time for bed, but man, this thing ached. Think of those tiny little whiteheads you've had on the side of your nose (c'mon, I'm not alone, right?). They're tiny, but they pack a big punch. Now transfer that up to your eyelid, where you never even thought about having nerve endings.

So, I did the inevitable. I picked at it. I am that gross person that just can't leave a scab unpicked, an ingrown toenail unexplored. Ugh. That sounds even worse in writing. Oh well, that's me. So, I took my contacts out and got as close as physically possible to the bathroom mirror while perched on the sink. With tweezers in hand, I started to gently scrape at the cursed bump. After a minute or so, I see something. Oh my, this is not an eye stye. This is actually an ingrown eyelash. WHAT THE HECK? Who gets this? This is just bizarre to me. But, the good news is, this is something that I can take care of! (That means no doctor visits with two kids under two years of age in tow!!) All I had to do was scrape down to the eyelash and pluck it out. I pluck my eyebrows. Heck, I even get them waxed every few months. I can handle this.

Yeah, plucking an eyelash out is a split second of WOW THAT STINGS LIKE A MOTHER pain. Then... blessed relief. And even better, by the next afternoon, the bump had completely receded and I got my baby blues back to normal.

And I got a truly strange blog post out of it, to top it all off.