NaBloPoMo Day 24: Taste the Rainbow

My husband is sort of like a Skittle. He is tough on the outside, looks (I’ve been told) like Stone Cold Steve Austin, has a big, loud voice that intimidates the crap out of high school freshmen, and spent years in the military. On the inside, he is squishy and fruity and sweet and you have to pretty much bite him in half to find that out.

Dan’s Achilles heel is his eyes. This is a man who has cheerfully held my hair back and made jokes while I threw up, wrestled students to the floor who’d been beaten to the point of brain damage to keep them from bleeding all over other kids, and seen things that I’m quite certain were grosser than that which I really would rather not think about. But if he watches me take my contacts out, he turns green and has to put his head between his knees.

I have no idea why he’s this way about eye things, but in a Murphy’s Law-style twist of fate, he keeps managing to somehow injure his own. A couple of years ago, he somehow managed to get some tiny shard of metal or glass—we were never able to fully ascertain what it was—stuck in his eye. It required months of treatment to heal fully and for months, he would wake up in the middle of the night in enough pain to have him thrashing around and gritting his teeth.

I’m in the waiting room at Urgent Care as I’m writing this.

Dan woke up yesterday morning and was rubbing his left eye a little. “It feels like somebody punched me in the eye,” is what he said.

“It wasn’t me,” I said.

An hour or so later, he walked up to me and took off his glasses. “Does this look normal to you?”

The answer was a resounding no. Normal was not what his eye looked. It was red. It was swollen. There was a…I’m not sure how to describe it—sort of a purplish cluster of spots near the center of the edge of the upper lid. “What is that?” I asked, totally horrified.

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

“No, seriously, what is that?”

“You’re freaking me out,” he told me.

I shut up, firmly resolved to diagnose him and cure him with the assistance of Dr. Google. I decided it could be maybe a sty, or something called a chaliazion, neither of which sounded like great fun. This morning he admitted that it was worse, although not painful or itchy, just gross and creepy-looking. Yesterday’s recommended treatment of warm compresses didn’t help at all, and he was too self-conscious to go to school today. All morning, I haven’t been able to stop staring at it. Every time he catches me, he says “Stop staring at it.”

“I can’t,” I admit. “It’s got, like, a life of its own.”

“Other people will see you staring and stare too,” he said.

“Other people will see your face and stare too,” I told him. “Do you not recognize the element of inevitability here?”

He’s really being pretty much a peach about it. It’s his tough, skittle-candy-like shell. On the inside, though, Dan is totally freaked out by being red and swollen and grotesque-looking, not to mention the fact that it’s his eye. I sincerely think he would prefer to sustain a testicle injury than an eye ailment.

But lucky him, he’s married a woman who feels comfortable discussing his various afflictions with the internet. Frankly, it's no wonder he’s not squishy on the outside too.