Day 4, 3:02 pm. Wednesday. If anyone out there's actually wondering about today's title, I'm thankfully not referring to myself with the sh*t stain reference. Last night I did a pantload of laundry and changed my sheets right before I went to bed. It was like heaven. White, clean, soft, fluffy, perfect. Middle of the night, I'm still up for some unknown reason and The Beast is lying beside me, splayed out on his back. Suddenly, I spot something on the sheet that looks like a big, brown bug.
But it's not.
It's an a-hole print.
I'll leave it at that, because it's really quite a disgusting story, but it happens to fall under the overall theme of my life. What else could I do but give The Beast a squeeze.
On to another uplifting story!
When I was a baby I got meningitis and had to be stuffed into an oxygen tent for a while. Upon release, I guess my right eye was all out of whack - floating around to the left when it was supposed to be looking right, right because it couldn't look left. Luckily I wasn't old enough at that point to realize people were looking at my forehead instead of my eyes to avoid feeling awkward.
Things went on like that for nine years. My parents tried everything - glasses, eye patches (yes, I was Little Miss Popular in school), pretty much anything to help straighten me and my eye out.
Unfortunately, nothing worked. And thank God my parents did for me what millions of others didn't do for their own children. They took me to Children's Hospital in PA for eye surgery. Pretty much all I remember is being wheeled away with a stuffed Snoopy clenched in my sweaty fist, crying without any tears falling down my cheeks. Although I don't think my parents were too thrilled, either.
Supposedly the whole thing took 10 minutes and then I magically woke up ... to some little piss ant down the row of beds barfing violently from the anesthesia. Wimp. I got outta' there and but quick - home to a creepy mansion of sorts in Emsworth, Pennsylvania. I have no idea how old that house was, but it scared the daylights out of me. I made the stupid mistake of watching Salem's Lot in 3rd grade, and this house made me pay the price for it - every single day we lived there.
Back to the gooey eyeball. Sitting in the haunted bar off the kitchen, with a shit-ton of garter snakes crawling on and in the rocks right outside the window, my parents let me watch Jaws out of sympathy for being such a freak. When it was over, not only was I too chicken to walk past one of the thatched windows (remember that kid vampire floating to the window in his jammies, scraping with his claw-like fingernails, whispering 'let me in, let me in,' with that nasty looking white skin?), I couldn't even pee in the toilet because there was water in there and I knew a shark would shoot out from below and take a chunk right out of my left butt cheek.
Anyway. Whoever did that surgery did a fabulous job, because 31 years later only a real pro or someone who knows me better than anyone can tell. Get me drunk or really tired and you'll see it go a little squirrely. I also have no depth perception in that eye so doctors constantly accuse me of failing tests on purpose. Um, yeah, what good would that do me?
Back then I was too young to realize that my medical journey wasn't going to stop with a lazy eye.
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