Friday, December 27, 2013

pink

This is certainly not how I envisioned wrapping up the year of awesome with pink eye in both eyes that has forced me to cancel my trip to have a belated Christmas dinner with the World's Cutest Nephew and his equally awesome parents. Anybody who knows me knows how I feel about my brother and his family. Knows how much it eats at me that they live so far away and our time together is always so short. This will be the second visit in a row that has been cancelled because of sickness in our house. I'm actually having a hard time writing this because my pink eye related weeping is mixing with my broken hearted weeping and I can barely see the keyboard.

So it started late afternoon on Christmas Eve. I like to have an array of snacky things on hand for those times when a big meal is on the horizon and you just need a little something to carry you the rest of the way. To that end I was whipping up a cheeseball that required some diced up jalapeno. I grabbed a few rings of my own pickled jalapenos and finished up the recipe, tossed it in the fridge to set up and then touched my eyes. This is something I have done in the past and will probably do in the future, it's just so easy to forget. Anyway this was about the worse I have ever done it. I immediately couldn't see, but Mike was nearby to get me to some cool water and the moment eventually passed. A handful of hours later, at church my eye was feeling very irritated and weepy, which I chalked up to the jalapeno burn. We came back home got the kids into bed and I crawled in not long after.

Just before 4am I was up with my eye completely swollen shut. I took myself to google to see how I should take care of this and alternated warm tea bag compresses with raw potato slices and by dinner had brought the swelling down tremendously. By Boxing Day there was still no real change in the symptoms aside from the decrease in swelling and after a quick nap I awoke with two red, swollen eyes that were sealed shut with pus. I had a conversation with the on-call doctor at our doc's office and he diagnosed bacterial pink eye over the phone (Doc Google concurred) and he called in a prescription to the closest open pharmacy to us, which was inconveniently located downtown and poor Mike had to wait for 30 minutes for them to fill it. Not that he complained.

You know what words go with pink eye.... highly contagious. There was no way I could take my highly contagious eyes up north to spend Christmas with the World's Nephew. Not to mention I am completely uncomfortable and exhausted. My face is exhausted. My vision is all wonky and I just wish I could take my eyes out and dip them in cold water for half an hour. Forty years I have managed to go without getting pink eye just to have it now seems unnecessarily cruel. I won't lie, I cried when I realized I wasn't going to be able to go and I cried when the girls left with Granny to go without me. We were talking to Dave, Mel and Elliot when the kids arrived at their place and I cried some more then. Skype is a beautiful thing and I was crying because I got to see the big smile Elliot had on his face when my girls walked in the door. How he kept reaching out to touch Maya's hair completely disinterested in the peas his Mom was trying to feed him. So it may have stung, but at least we had that. Mike and I got to see them open our Christmas presents and they opened ours from them, so in some small way we got to be part of the fun. I stayed online with them for longer than my eyes would have liked only getting off to have my drops and rest them for a while. It's probably going to be a rough couple of days as I can't really do much of anything for too long before my eyes protest, but I'm glad the girls are there and having fun with Granny and everyone, but ya definitely not the way to finish up the year of awesome.

1 comment:

Betsy Hart said...

Oh Shan, I'm so sorry. :( We just had a round of pink eye in our house. It's now fun at all. :( Are you going to be able to reschedule your trip?