never have eye ever

Mine eyes!  O, mine eyes.  What is the pollen count going to be tomorrow?  I don't think I can stand yet another day of waking up with my eyelids literally welded together from dried up tears and other yucky, yucky allergy-related secretions.  Sigh.

I went to visit my ophthalmologist today to see what she can do about it. I like my ophthalmologist.  She's one of those really happy peppy people types who has a middle school aged kid and now eats nothing but Diet Coke all day as part of her strict milfing regimen.  She talks really fast, like an auctioneer strung out on the crystal.

She also confided in me that her uncorrected vision is not actually so horrible that she needs glasses.  In fact, the left lens sitting in her spiffy Prada frames has as much myopia-correcting power as does my car windshield.  But she makes one hell of a walking advertisement for her onsite upscale eyewear boutique.  All that Diet Coke has made her very sly.  Maybe if I ever go back to being a lawyer I'll start sporting a neck brace to client meetings.

Anyway, she pried open my poor puffy eyelids, dripped some mystery drops on my bloodshot eyeballs and began examining me with a barrage of gadgetry.

"Wow," she said, looking at me through a scope of some kind.  "No wonder your eyes are so small... your conjunctiva are covered with papillae that's causing all the swelling."

Okay.  That's a lot of information passed down in just one sentence. 

First of all, conjuncti-whatever is not a word I ever want to hear mentioned to me in an exam room, least of all after a certain MTV show about mentally subnormal guidos taught me and the rest of the viewing public that conjuctivitis can be transmitted easily through everyday dancefloor ass-to-face contact.  Um, no thank you, doctor. 

Second, papillae is really just a fancy word for bumps, but it sounds so much scarier.  I've heard of Human Papilloma Virus -- a recent widespread public health campaign taught me that parents should take their teen girls to get vaccinated against it in case they carry the whore gene. 

Or a papillon?  Dog that looks just like sewer rat strung out on the crystal.  Woof to papillae.

Finally, I may just be crabby from the allergies, but did I catch a subtle racial slur in there?  I'm Chinese, so my eyes are "so small?"  Just thinking about it is giving me 'Nam flashbacks of the time I fainted in Cleveland Park and one of the cracker paramedics hauling me to the ambulance on a stretcher leaned over in concern and asked me if my skin was "always so yellowish." 

My eyes are always small!  But these unbearable allergies are making it worse.  The world is my classic film, and I am watching the whole thing in letterbox mode.

Well, my ophthalmologist obviously felt pity for my plight.  She picked up her prescription pad from under a can of Diet Coke and prescribed me some Pataday brand eye drops to alleviate the itchiness, redness, swelling and teariness. 

Unfortunately, when I stopped at the drugstore on the way home, I discovered after waiting in a Ukrainians-queueing-for-bread style line that the pharmacy had run out of Pataday.  I've been on an internet ordering streak of late, so I decided to check out the drops online.

It turns out the Pataday website features a Van Gogh self portrait as part of its advertising banner (slogan: "Once-a-day relief for itchy allergy eyes ... That's genius").  Of course I was instantly curious what connection, if any, Van Gogh has to the sale of eye drops.  I guess it's not a bad tagline -- though I daresay the same ad campaign would have been far less successful if Pataday were an antidepressant or an ear medicine. 

I hope those eye drops are really just that good.