Adding Insult to Injury

Did your post-holiday blues kick in yet? You know that feeling. All the presents have been opened, leaving only the mess of empty boxes and the realization that you have to find a home for all your new stuff. The cookies and cheesecake and pies and candy are mostly gone, but the sugar cravings continue, as does the bloated waistline and weight gain. The lights on the houses are just a reminder that you need to put your own decorations away. Without the holidays to anticipate, all that is left is the bleakness of winter, the unrelenting cold, the itchy dry skin, and the emptiness as you realize that for the time being, you have nothing to look forward to and a long way to go until your next break from work. So if those blues haven’t started yet, they should be by now, huh?

Two days after Christmas, my post holiday blues began. My family drove home from Atlanta, where we visited my sisters for the holidays. We went out for dim sum before we left, one of my favorite holiday traditions, but following days of overeating, a few thousand pounds of dumplings can make for some pretty serious heartburn. I said my goodbyes, hoping no one would squeeze me too tightly, and burped my way to the car.

After a few days in a row of eating too much and sleeping poorly, I was in desperate need of a nap. The best nap in the world is the car nap, unless you are the driver. The droning of the DVD blaring behind me along with my husband talking and the bags in the car rattling in the back was all it took to lull me to sleep. I must have conked out with my head on sideways, because when I woke up, my neck was killing me.

My neck tends to bother me most of the time, in the way that all people over forty have a body part that doesn’t like being part of the total package anymore. Some people constantly complain about shoulder pain or low back pain or tennis elbow, even if that arm has never held a racket. For me, that body part used to be my left knee, which has been studied by doctors before who discounted the pain as pre-degenerative arthritis and told me to deal with it. But lately, my neck has been making a push as the most irritated body part. It just hurts, man. It’s a pain in my ass, that pain in my neck.

We got home and I had to help unload the car like a freaking hunchback because my neck hurt so badly. My husband carried the duffle bags upstairs and I unloaded them, carrying the first load of laundry to the washing machine. When I bent over to put the clothes in the machine, I threw up in my own mouth. Nice, huh? It might all be the same going down, but coming up, it is just puke, which in my case I re-swallowed.

I decided to skip dinner and sit on the couch with a heating pad on my neck. The longer I sat there, the more I thought a new pillow would be a wise move, so I got ready to drive to the store to buy one. Before I left, I petted my long-haired cat. At some point between that action and arriving at the store, I rubbed my eye and transferred some cat hair directly into my orbital socket, where unbeknownst to me, it wrapped itself tightly around my eye like a barbed wire tourniquet. My eye started tearing, then progressed to a full blown allergic reaction, complete with pus, swelling, and bright redness. Did you ever see that scene in “Papillion” where the character played by Dustin Hoffman rubs ground glass in his eyes? I was living it. I took my contact out a couple of times to suck on it, the most sanitary way to clean a contact I know, but surprisingly, it didn’t help at all. When I checked out with my pillow, the salesclerk looked slightly above my head, avoiding direct eye contact. I can’t say I blame her.

When I got home, I went back upstairs to put the clothes in the dryer, puking a little in my mouth again, and then went to the bathroom to take out my contacts and wash my face. I put my contacts in the case and looked closely in the mirror. Luckily, the cat hair was completely covered in a big string of mucus that I pulled out of my eye like rope. I scrubbed my face with cleanser, and when I filled my palms with water to rinse, I jammed my finger so hard up my left nostril that I ripped it open. The skin on the inside rim of my nose flapped loosely, and the space where it had been was rapidly filling up with blood. There really was nothing else to do but sit on the floor and cry, so that is what I did.

Then I dried off my face, shoved a wad of tissue in my bloody nose, and put on my glasses. If raping my own nostril isn’t a good reason for the blues, I don’t know what is.