End in sight
A little over a year ago, I sat in the waiting room of my eye specialist.
"Herzog...?"
A nurse with a clipboard stood in the middle of the waiting room, with that bored yet expectant vibe all nurses seem to have. She looked down at her clipboard again.
"Werner Herzog...?"
A cold sweat ran down my spine, as I frantically looked around the waiting room. Without hurry, an elderly gentleman with his back to me was urged into standing by his younger female companion. He ambled slowly up the hallway with the bored nurse while I looked incredulously around, hoping to make eye contact with SOMEONE to acknowledge here we were, all with our miserable respective eye problems, in the same room as a near mythical genius master of The Form.
Everyone in the room was ancient, and not a single one met my (troubled) eyes.
I scrambled for my phone to text Tyler.
"WERNER HERZOG IS HERE!!!!!" I exclaimed in all caps.
"WHAT?????!!!!" he immediately, satisfyingly responded.
Moments later, I was ushered into a small room where I was given the floor to complain about a small round form on my eye. A new form. A foreign form. An unwelcome form. Some nights, I woke up with that eye in searing pain, unable to open my eyelid without a burning sensation overtaking an entire half of my skull. Most of the time, I felt nothing and it was just there, this little, tiny blob, but a blob that had not been there mere weeks ago.
"Is it....cancer, doc????" I ventured, not bravely.
"No. It's a stye. Put a warm compress on it twice a day for 15 minutes and it should clear up."
I left, salty and unsatisfied. What kind of voodoo was this? I didn't drive to the VALLEY to be told to put a WASHCLOTH on my eye for weeks on end. I wanted medicine! Terrifying, long needles, full of powerful blob-dissolving power!!!!! Where was Werner now??? THIS quackery should be the subject of his next opus!!!!!
That night, I put a washcloth on my eye. The problem is, because I'm basically blind, I can't wear contacts and have a hot compress over one eye because after 15 minutes, the contact would have suffused to my eye under the wimpy duress of dryness, resulting in my eye being in even more discomfort.
So, I needed to squeeze a wet towel underneath one eyeglass while...going about my business? One-eyed? That wouldn't work either. So, wait a minute now, I needed to just lie there, unseeing, for 15 minutes, twice a day? Who has time for that???? Who has time to treat a STYE?
Not I.
Not.
Eye.
The stye did not lessen after the single warm compress application, and, wise to the chicanery, I didn't do it again for an entire year.
Now, a year later, and nothing has changed. It's still there. No bigger, no smaller.
Finally fed up, I took the issue to my Facebook mom group, which provides the answer to literally any question imaginable within minutes. Sure enough, 15 minutes after posting a photo of the offending tiny eyelid blob, I had recommendations for superior eye specialists mere blocks from my front door and the name and cure for my malady.
"That's not a stye. It's a CHALAZION. Similar. I had it last year. Get this eye wash and apply a warm compress twice a day for 15 minutes and it will be gone in 2 weeks."
Goddammit.
So here I am, 2 weeks deep into a once daily (I still can't seem to fit in more than one session lying down staring into the dark void of a washcloth in a day) CHALAZION CHALLENGE, and it is....yeah. Significantly smaller. About 1/4 of its prior size.
The end is in sight. The slow, thermal chipping away at an offending blob. It's not quite gone, but it will be, soon. An eye blob to mark the passing of time. An offensive blob that spanned the offensive blob of 2020 with me. It's rather poetic, watching it -- forcing it-- to disappear now, when my world is beginning to open back up.
I don't need you, anymore, blob.
I was invited inside a friend's house last week. As I sat on her couch (!!!!!), her daughter wandered in from her Zoom school and whispered to her mom, "Why is she allowed inside without a mask?"
When her mom explained that we were both vaccinated, I offered "so now we can even HUG. Want one?" She ran towards me, 50 delicious pounds squeezed against my chest and wrapped around my waist. A perfect, new, welcome blob.
I can't wait for summer, for herd immunity, when I will be affixing people to me and me to people like temporary, benign tumors. Bringing you all in to my warmth, not letting go. I will have to stop myself from manually cradling the face of the first unmasked barista I order from, the jawline of the first bartender.
The First Bartender. We'll all be wandering, parched, back into a community elevated to a mythical status.
We'll all be Pompeians, dusting off the ashes of our prophylactic hibernation, leaving hiccups of dust in the wake of our hugs, our face masks tucked deep in our bags, wrinkled with disuse -- a cave of forgotten dreams.