[click image]...
Twenty-four hours into it, the puffiness is finally beginning to ebb and the vision is beginning to come back. I was up for a minute around nine this morning and made the grave mistake of looking in the mirror. GROSS. So I ran straight back to bed. It's still awful but not so irredeemably upsetting. If I'd snapped an image of myself this morning for you, you would never come back here, I'm sure, and that's not even accusing you of being cheap and superficial. It's just a fact that people don't willingly hang with mutants from this planet or any other. It's too creepy.
The drill seems to be that my left iris tries to blow out of my face and my right eyelids are hot to join it. So even though all the pain is on the left, it looks as though I've been punched hard on the right. This image is left on left and right on right. For some reason the camera in this machine doesn't make the flip like regular cameras do. This state of puffiness is only merely unattractive as heck, but the full-blown episode is scary as hell. It's my own immune system doing it to me.
An allergen, or a toxin, hits and my immune system goes so batshit crazy to fight it that it slashes away at my own tissues in its determination to fight off the bad guys. The good news is there ARE things one can do to prevent or heavily mitigate this, but, of course, the bad news is that it costs quite a bit. So I am sleeping as much as I can, nuking myself with all manner of anti-inflammatory stuff, and spending most of my awake time studying up on this, becoming as expert as possible so as to get more real HELP from the doctor.
...
Oops. I fergot to mention the part about where the left ear chimes in with the feeling of a beached goldfish writhing around in it. That part is a thrill a minute too. I mean, it's better than the icepick in the ear thing, but tends to put one in at least as florid a state of alarm anyway.
I mean, SENSE tells you there's no goldfish in there, but your SENSES tell you, yes-there-motherfucking-IS-and-get-it-outta-here-RIGHT-now. I just took a bobby pin to it—I know, I know, elbows only in ears—and that goldfish has been thrown back into the pond. I hope he stays there.
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