So yeah Pink Eye. I’ll be 47 in august and I’ve been felled by a condition 5 year olds get. Ironically I never got it as a 5 yr old. As a matter of fact I’ve never had Pink Eye. I don’t think any of my 7 brothers and sisters had Pink Eye as kids.

This has been a big eye opener. Yeah I went there.

No clue how I got it either. Neither kid had it when I got it. Thankfully no one else in the house got it from me; an unexplained miracle to this day. I do drop Frank off at that giant petri dish known as pre-school. I can’t imagine what manner of microbes are crawling around that joint.

Every day a new batch of bacteria delivered in the form of a snotty varmint wiping their noses on sleeves, touching door knobs, coughing into the air as to get the most effective germ spread pattern possible. The ultimate biological weapons packed in the deadliest of delivery systems – a kid. Surprised I haven’t gotten the Plague yet. But thanks to the anti-vaccine crowd I hear there is a good chance the Plague might make a comeback.

Anyway my eye started feeling weird last Friday afternoon. By dinner I could barely see out of it and by bedtime (12:00-1:00am for me) it was hard to keep open from the pain. We had eye drops left over from when Frank had pink eye a month before. So I bathed both eyes in that stuff.  Worked too. By Sunday morning both eyes were glued shut. Here is what it looked like by Sunday afternoon.

WARNING! Graphic eye picture dead ahead!

Drops didn’t work dude.

That’s just nasty.

The pain was a little surprising. Anyone I talked to said it should itch but not hurt and that includes the doc I went to on Monday. Never got the itching part. But man it hurt. I did learn something. Telling kids not to touch their pink type infected eyes or not to scratch a rash is just about the dumbest thing we could say to our kids. From the jump I couldn’t keep from touching my eyes. It’s a wonder it only lasted 3 days the way I was pulling and poking and rubbing my eyes. I’m surprised my hands didn’t get infected. How in the world could I expect Frank or Anne Marie to posses that type of discipline? Crazy.

But the bigger issue is the shame. I learned long ago with Frank it doesn’t matter if you’re sick you still have to operate in public. Groceries must be bought, kids must be dropped off, errands must be run. We have a very active cul-de-sac, can’t avoid everybody, should I wear a sign? I don’t want infect the Sac kids and their parents but I don’t want to ignore them either.

The problem was my eyes looked hideous as you can see from the picture above. I’m much cooler looking with Pink Eye right? During the day it wasn’t too hard because I could just go the too cool for school rout and drop the shades to cover my unclean state. But at night it was tough.

Wanted to get a little mcReeses mcFlurry on the way home from the mcPodcast, well I had to look away from the dude at the window for fear he wouldn’t serve me. Then I realized he became more frightened I might stick up the joint, so I sped away.

Need to hit the Kroger on the way home from tee ball but now it’s dark, what to do? Do I stare people right in the eye and dare them to comment, shout Unclean! Unclean! if I see someone get within two kroger-meters of my position. Do I just look down in shame and avoid all eye contact what ever? It’s a quandary.

I went with the for shame eyes down method, if you were wondering. I really wanted to shout Unclean! just to see what happened.

My eyes are clear now and apparently I was only contagious the first 24 hours or so. But I was quite the social pariah there for a while.

Thankfully my long national nightmare is over.

Until the next snotty little beast infects me with something.

Parenting is great!