Does it itch?

[parasitegirl]

4:30 AM and the pain was insistent.

It had started the day before. While dining at an Indian restaurant boasting of the world’s best rice pudding and serving the most disappointing garlic naan we’d ever tasted, it grew worse. The pain in my right eye was sharp, digging. I sniffled from the constant flow of diverted tears dripping from my bad eye. First, I tried to rinse my eye in the bathroom. Then, as D-boy waited for the check and called our cab, I stumbled out into the strip mall in search of eye drops. I bought eye drops at a nearby drug store, but they provided no respite from the pain.

D held me in the cab. We were headed to the Clark County Library in Vegas, which is a historical building that also has a stage and theater area, for the second headliner show of the Las Vegas Belly dance Intensive, D’s first exposure to the dance. “Want me to lick it?” D offered, if only to make me smile. My own flow of conversation was muffled by the pain. We arrived. I smiled. D pulled out his iPhone and checked into Facebook’s Four Square application…confounding his friends as to why the hell a boy in Vegas would go to a library.

 

The irritation came and went through the show. We joined up with Artemisia and her husband and, after many tries, called a cab back to the hotel. You have to call cabs in Vegas; they don’t allow you to flag them down. Artemisia’s husband, Chris, fished out a tissue for me and my eye. We all talked about teenage drinking habits in our respective countries: Mad Dog, Boone’s wine, and fruit brandies. Artemisia told us of how, on her last trip to America, she deeply disturbed her Seattle hosts by insisting on a tour that involved eating at the various infamous fast food venues of America…as that appealed to her as “The American Experience”…and that she wanted to go to a Wal-Mart this time.

4:30AM came. Without the distraction of watching dance, talking, dopamine or the other cocktails of being smitten, I was in pain. I grew restless. My shifting and sniffling awoke D.

“It huuuuurts, I feel like such a wuss” I whimpered.
“You’re not a wuss…” he murmured.

You can’t suffer the physical act of weeping for hours and not feel the emotional drag of sadness and despair. Your mind is wired to your body and the border is porous… if it exists at all. I was exhausted and depressed.

Rinsing my eye did nothing. Drops did nothing. My eyelid had begun to swell, reminding me of the horrible morning in January that I didn’t leave America because my eyelids had decided to add to the physical traumas of my Christmas trip home. D would later ask me if I was always so accident prone and urgent-care bound in Japan or if this was just a visiting America thing.

I called him into the bathroom, where the lights were bright, and asked him to look into the areas of my eyes I could not see…to check for objects, rips, anything. It felt like there was a small, sharp stone in my eye. He reported there was nothing he could see but that my whole eye was now a mess of red veins.

We would have to do something. I was filled with the sorrow hangover of my tears. I wanted to curl up in bed and have this whole thing taken care of by magical medical elves or something…but neither of us knew the medical options in the area or where to hail a medi-elf. I snapped out of my pity-party to get shit done.

I called the hotel operator and found a 24-hour care center. I called the care center and they said they accepted walk-ins and that the waiting room wasn’t filled with the drunken, wounded, Vegas excess. I wrote down the address and number. We pulled on our clothing and headed down to the taxi stand.

Even with the exact address, phone number, and name our cab driver asked us many follow-up questions about where we were going, as if our tourist asses were well versed in the medical options in Vegas and considered no trip to Sin City complete without a visit for 24-hour care. He obviously wasn’t sure of where he was going.

D became agitated, suggesting that the cabbie could call the care center if he needed more info…the driver ignored this suggestion but drove and drove through nowhere, setting up a GPS navigation system around the same time D was finding things on Google maps. I’d slipped back under the warm blankets of fuck-it. I couldn’t muster the energy to worry so long as we seemed to be moving towards something that might eventually bring me to a world without this pain. I conserved my energy.

We arrived. D pulled out his iPhone and checked into Facebook’s Four Square application…an action he would later regret on the chance that it would stir up parental anxiety and bring up past memories of urgent care trips. I filled out forms and put a deposit on my credit card, as I’d not stopped by my room for more cash, not wanting to wake up my roommate.

D and I sat, spent, and stared at the TV set to CNN. In light of the earlier gas explosions in California, 24-hour cable news was trying to scare us about the terror network of gas-pipelines snaking through America. The visuals and maps of these underground tubes webbed below us all looked like the red crazing of my eye. D mumbled that the next move would be to scare us with the news of a nation covered in wires that span the nation bringing the dangerous power of electricity into our homes. Good, same contempt for the fear-mongering of American news…same page.

My name was called. I gestured to D that it would be fine to join me, that I’d prefer it.

Our nurse was in her 50’s, a stocky, strong woman with short gelled-up hair, her white scalp showed through dark red thorns. D kept walking so that he could stand next to me/the exam table.

“Sir!” she barked. “Sir! Sit in the chair!”
D didn’t react at first.
“SIIIIIR!”

I also blurted out “Sir!” and waved at the chair, my reptile brain wanting to get past this, not wanting to upset the momentum towards relief.

 D sat down.

I started to slip off my shoes to step up onto the exam table.

“Put your shoes on! That thing’s filthy!!” she commanded.

Shaken, I kept my shoes on and pulled myself up onto the table.

 I can’t describe her real voice to you in any clear detail. It was brusque, that’s about it. However, as D and I retold the experience, creating memory pathways for a narrative probably best forgotten, we used a deep, tobacco-wounded rasp…not unlike Tom Waits as a dinner waitress. This is the voice I suggest you read her in. It captures her impact, if not her reality. 

She asked me why I was there. I explained that my eye hurt, like there was something in it or a cut or infection. Not looking up from her clipboard she interrupted me. 

“You got pink eye.”

…?

“Does it itch?” she asked.

“No, it feels like something is scratching my eyeball and…”

“That’s ITCHING” she informed me.

It’s really the opposite of itching, I thought, itching is where you want something to scratch you…scratching and sharp are scratching and sharp pain.

“Pink eye is very contagious,” she told me “Who gave it to you?”

I thought about what I know about pink-eye. I am ashamed to admit my knowledgeof Pink Eye is limited to that shitty film, Knocked-Up. Fecal contamination…were the pillows of the Flamingo fecally loaded? Would there be an epidemic of pink-eye at the intensive?

 “Uhhhh…no one, not my knowledge..”I stammered.

“ Well SOMEONE gave you PINK EYE!”

Fecal-zombie-funk belly dancers? Pink-eye poop ninja? Whatever. I was being pulled into the ocean of fuck-it again. Whatever. Pinkeye. Meds? Relief? I didn’t fucking care. D cared, but knew not what to say.

Our nurse looked down at my information again.

“You live in Japan?”

“Yeah…”

And with that her whole demeanor changed. I mean, in her eyes my eye was still vengefully-infected with pink eye, but she became chipper on the subject of Japan. She’d been stationed at Yakosuka base. Did I speak the language? Yes, and I explained what I do and she nattered on about how her children had picked it up like little sponges…then she left the room.

When I mentioned this to my friend Kim, she told me how military nurses are the ones you want in the trenches with you for the big things but, yes, on minor medical issues they can be without tact and full of fail.

We were left alone, unsure if anyone else would be coming to see me.

“I bet she tells that to all of her patients” we joked.
“Come in, one arm missing…””Ya got PINK~EYE”
“(Miming arterial spray) Does it Itch? THAT’S ITCHING! YA GOT PINK EYE!”
“Eyeball gauged out…””YA GOT PINK EYE!”
“She just scrawls PINK EYE on everything and the other nurses have learned to ignore it.”

To our relief, a doctor came in. He put drops in my bad eye, tilted me back, dimmed the lights and scanned my eye with a light. When I had to look up or down my eyeball twitched and I squirmed from the pain.

Corneal tear under my pupil. Antibiotic drops and pain killers…would heal quickly. No contacts for 10 days. No goddamned mention of pink-eye.

We thanked him. I paid for my visit and got my prescription. We were told there were pharmacies near our hotel, but they wouldn’t be open until 8…we didn’t believe that there wouldn’t be 24 hour pharmacies in Vegas..I mean..it’s gotta burn when you pee in Vegas more frequently than other locales and you’d think the casinos would want people over-medicated and unable to leave.

They called us a cab.

D started the iPhone hunt for 24hour pharmacies, with no luck. Our cabbie asked me what I’d been in for.

“Scratched cornea…but it could have been worse…could have been PINK EYE.”
“My ex-wife had that once, got it from manure”

Our eyebrows raised and we never did figure out if his ex-wife had gotten pink eye, or a scratched cornea, from manure…or how exactly that worked. This cabbie was well versed in Vegas locations and was wide awake and needing to subject us to his patter.

He told us he had one lung. That he used to live in a colder place and drive his ex-wife crazy by standing upstairs, as she shoveled, and shouting at her about where she’d missed a spot…but that wasn’t how he really got to her. He used to tell her that he heard voices telling him to kill her. HAHAHAHA!

Great. After Pink Eye Lady I really needed a good dose of misogyny.

And, the greatest thing about the claim of scitzo voices? They were made more real to his ex-wife because…well…he was adopted but he didn’t know that his whole life and his adoptive mother actually IS paranoid-schizophrenic, giving an extra level of reality to an already disturbing, emotionally-abusive ruse. HAHAHAHA!

Best thing he ever did was get divorced, he told us. I hope his ex is ok now.

“I bet you tell that to all the happy couples in your cab.”

He went on, talking about his honing of his natural asshole-ish inclinations. Oh, not so much a misogynist, a full-on misanthrope. HAHAHAHA! I agreed that if you’re gonna make becoming a true asshole your life’s work, Vegas is probably a good place to be. We laughed. HAHAHA.

He dropped us off at a Walgreens near our hotel. We got out and found that the pharmacy was close until 9:00. We both quickly recapped the fact that the odd conversation in the cab had happened. We found a way to cross the street and confirmed that the CVS pharmacy was similarly closed.

The sidewalk was littered with porn-cards for escorts and such. A truck with an ad for a  vanilla porny-place drove back and forth and we noted how unattractive and “tired soccer-mommy” the lady on it looked. We decided, unwisely, to walk back to hotel.

It wasn’t far but Vegas doesn’t want you walking outside. Point A to point B isn’t allowed. Point A to casino B by buffet C around show D back through casino E to bar F and onward….that is Vegas. Sidewalk after sidewalk snaked away from the street, hearding us towards odd buildings and casinos. We crossed the street and walked along the Miracle Mile shopping center.

Drunks eyeballed me, my fine ass all bruised and my face watery, in yoga pants and one of D’s shirt. Yeah. Drink it in. Aww, yeah. Glad, I’m getting YOUR attention, makes me feel like a real woman.

I explained how, at certain hours, Japan is full of drunks and the dangerous puddles of salaryman vomit but American drunken behavior strikes me as…well..American.

We started walking past the construction for a new Sugar Factory location near the Paris hotel. Sugar Factory is home of the “Couture (loli)Pop”…so over the panels hiding construction were images of “Celebrities” posed with their lolis. I use the quotation marks because the first celeb I spotted was Vanilla Ice. Most of the photos featured the same “oh, I am shockingly sexy Lolita!” pose…Katy Perry, Shaneen Doughtery, Kim Kardasian. Thankfuly, no Carrot Top. In Vegas Drunk Bingo, you win when you spot Carrot Top…but you also lose. I mean…it’s Carrot Top.

We turned a corner, to walk into Paris to see if we could get pancakes, when an odd celebrity caught my eye. There was Jon Stewart, looking embarrassed at having been captured in the Sugar Factory store, awkwardly holding a lollipop with the expression of “Yeah, ok, I’m getting candy for my kids…can I leave now?” which made us love him even more than we already did.

D checked into Four Square on his iPod…I mean, we were in fake Paris and he had to reassure folks that he wasn’t broken in a hospital or nothing. Luckily, the dopamine anticipation joy D gets from knowing he’ll occasionally get random badges and prizes on Four Square is enough for him and he, like me, has no love for actual gambling. No pancakes to be had. We decided that breakfast could be ordered from bed and that sleep was needed. We’d sleep, get my prescription filled, and order pancakes.

Of course, I was still in denial about the fact I wouldn’t be able to perform at one o-clock (I’d be magically healed by whatever eyedrops! I could dance without contacts! The swelling would go down!)  or go to the Liberace museam at two, or attend workshops.

We retired to bed again. In the last hours of D being in Vegas we’d often ask each other if it itched…and regardless of the reply…”That’s ITCHING!” Or the moment he brought me toward him, and was about to tell me how beautiful I am, and I blurted out “It hurts when my pupils dialate!”…it’s not the pink eye talking, that’s just how I roll. I'm romantic like that.

Comments

[akibare.livejournal.com]

Hey! Coulda been PREGNANT!!! (Or maybe that's just the college health center version.)

Still, I HAD pink eye as a kid. It itched like CRAZY, to the point it was tempting to claw out my eyes nothing as itched that bad ever, but it didn't hurt. Just itched like a MOFO. So reading that first "it's pink eye" I have to admit, I was thinking, wait... what?

Best of luck with it...

[kimuchi.livejournal.com]

IIRC, ours was strep. My friends and I used to joke that you could show up with an axe handle sticking out of your back and they'd tell you "strep can do that".

[replyhazy.livejournal.com]

O.M.FG.

I am SO SORRY this happened. Please believe me. America does not hate you. It just SEEMS like it. :-(

::hugs::

[parasitegirl.livejournal.com]

That's just how I roll.
This may explain the sad picture of me on my facebook...clutching a carafe of coffee after I'd given up dancing at all.

I bet my comment about sensitive drummer boys trying to do energy work on my eyes makes more sense now.

[alonewiththemoon]

I have had pinkeye, *and* I have had a scratched cornea--the latter is nothing like the former!

The Carrot Top posters in Vegas are terrifying. Like evil clown terrifying. I'd almost take a scratched cornea over having to look at his evil evil face.

[parasitegirl.livejournal.com]

Carrot Top sometimes shows up in Tanya LV7s FB pictures...but I love her none the less.

[alonewiththemoon]

Also, yay D--he sounds like a good one.

[cymbeline.livejournal.com]

Oh owwww! I once got a corneal tear via getting nail glue in my eye. I don't recommend that, ever, to anyone. The ER staff thought it was hilarious until the Dr mentioned his wife had done the same thing and he patted my shoulder.

[indigo-eyz.livejournal.com]

I mean..it’s gotta burn when you pee in Vegas more frequently than other locales...

I'm really sorry about your cornea. I do have to say, though, that this has to be the funniest damn thing I've read all night (particularly the little nugget above...)

[parasitegirl.livejournal.com]

Oh, I aim to provide laughs.

[bedlam-n-bedlah.livejournal.com]

Any thoughts on how the corneal tear came to be?

[parasitegirl.livejournal.com]

Something under my hard lenses worn too long the night before is my best bet...second bet is glitter...but really, no clue.

[suzycat.livejournal.com]

NOW I'M ITCHING.

[parasitegirl.livejournal.com]

Ya got pinkeye, quakes will do that to you!

[counterword.livejournal.com]

Ain't nuthin' like a corneal abrasion to cheer you up!