Did I Ever Tell You About the Time…

Hey there lovely readers.

Did I every tell you about the time I put myself into the ER with a ridiculous self-inflicted injury?

Here is how the story goes, as I wrote it out last month. . .

A couple of days ago my eye started hurting. Each morning I wake it is redder and sorer than the night before. This morning I cooked pancakes with it taped shut because it hurt to keep it open.  Side note: When you lose sight in one eye, you lose depth perception which turns out to be a very underrated optical skill.

So I went into the local Emerg because I couldn’t get in the doctor’s and all three professionals I contacted told me to seek medical attention. I waited a few hours because people have real problems, like concussions and broken bones. I’m just sitting in the waiting stall, huddled in a chair and scrolling on my iPhone like a hermit-esque coworker who takes secret coffee breaks

The doctor didn’t roll his eyes at my attendance as much as the admitting nurse. Perhaps because he remembered my visit less than a week ago with my youngest son. (He’s fine, we just have a tradition in our home where, before two years of age, our boys will injure themselves at 5 pm on a Friday and require glue/steri strips on their heads somewhere). Perhaps because he also knew that having something stuck in your eye is a risk for infection.

He diligently froze my eye, put some dye in it and checked me out with the optical apparatus you look in at the eye doctors’. He was using words like conjunctive and ulcer. He came up for air to tell me he could see a short fragment of hair that was sorta suctioned underneath my eyelid. With each blink it was rubbing into my eyeball and dug a groove he called an ulcer.

He brought out some sterilized tweezers to remove it. Through some stubby fingered team work and me Jedi-mind-tricking myself into keeping my eyes open while being poked at (seriously, I felt like it was ninja training) he attempted to remove the hair and it became free. It was set free but not captured. He sighed because he really wanted to show it to me and see if I knew what it was.

But I did know what it was and I was hoping I wouldn’t have to explain myself.

Because it’s embarrassing. And close family and friends keep telling me not to do it, but I don’t listen. The word intervention might even come to mind.

I knew what was in my eye and I had only confessed the tale to Conor. Now I would tell the doctor: this was a piece of hair from a bang trim gone awry (like all my home bang trims seem to).

How anticlimactic, right?  It’s tragically boring and random. It’s also not a surprise. When I told my bestie she simply laughed and said ‘Of course you did!….I’m taking your scissors away’.

Cause I’m the three-footed girl of nonsensical injuries. For instance, I once had to write out an incident report when I cut my eye while organizing laminated posters at work. Every sentence of the report just reminded me that my common sense is largely allocated to buying cheese on sale, memorizing song lyrics and operating my iPhone.

I’m sure doctors hear it all. I’m sure they learn to stifle their eye rolls when a grown adult puts herself in emerg because she can’t adult. They probably have that special restraint in writing a prescription for antibiotics when they really think one for common sense would be more effective.  This doctor smiled with part pity and part humour – because, after all that, my bangs didn’t even look that good. They looked like I asked the hairdresser for something that said ‘irresponsible preschooler whose parents will never buy her lunchables and she will never learn to high jump‘. Paying homage to my younger self, it’s true….

(Bad home hair trims are my familial legacy)

I sheepishly left the ER with a prescription and a relieved but very red eye. My PR explanation of the injury was a flippant,  ‘Oh I just had something stuck in my eye, they got it out’.  It was a blanket statement coating up my cheapskating, DIYing, clumsy-fingered, bang-trimming ways. Ways that, I will just say it, they are unstoppable! So what if I can’t adult! Sure, I can’t pour things from one container to another without spilling most of it. Maybe, my sock drawer is full of loose mismatched footwear. I prefer to watch reality tv over the news. BUT I am self aware of my inability to cut hair and I am willing to stick out and keep learning so one day I will proudly say ‘yes! this is my fringe! No, Beyonce and I don’t share a hair dresser. No, I didn’t get a bang trim, I’m not rich. Yup, I trimmed it myself!!’. Cause that is what adults do, try and try again!! (and maybe I will buy this….just in casies).

 

Thanks for reading. This post is part of a link up with a few of my blogging friends. We all wrote a post based on ‘Did I Ever Tell You About That Time…’  Make sure to check them out.