What causes that occasionally morning eye pain, the chlorinated feeling after being nowhere near a swimming pool? Is it closing your eyes too long? Not shutting them for long enough? It happens infrequently enough that I find myself weaving through the same thought process each time.
I worry more about my ears than I do my eyes. Every time I see a show I wear earplugs – sometimes I wear earplugs in loud bars or restaurants, and always when I play an actual drum kit (as opposed to an electronic one). So I’m not worried about losing my hearing, but my right ear has been some degree of blocked for almost two years. If the degree never varied it would be a questionable move on my part to have gone this long without seeing a doctor, but I keep thinking, “Well, now it’s finally gone.” It’s hard to see that something is continuous rather than a series of issues, and sometimes the degree to which my ear feels like it needs to pop is almost imperceptible, lulling me into believing I’ve finally vanquished the issue.
My vanquishing tools have been q-tips (only once, after a lifetime of haranguing people with the “Never put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear!” canard), special irrigating solution from the drugstore (a serious missed opportunity for puns on their part), and hydrogen peroxide. Sometimes in combination with one of those bulbs for washing out your ear. But, perhaps in part because we’re tipping slightly into fall, I’ve been waking up lately feeling like my entire right ear is underwater, and having to physically pull it down and out away from my head in order to break the seal and open it up (but not completely). I think I have to come to the conclusion, at this point, that there’s wax on my eardrum or something more nefarious and I need someone to really peer inside and see.
If I wake up feeling like I’ve been swimming wide-eyed through chlorine, at least I’m not worrying about my ear.
The type of water that has concerned my recently is the regular tap variety. For whatever reason, my anxiety about rare parasites (ie naegleria fowleri) has spiked and every time water glances off the inside of my nose in the shower I think, “Well, this could be it.” The rational mind (I note in real time that I’m not making a claim to that rational mind…) knows that naegleria fowleri is incredibly rare and typically kills people when it’s living in lakes or non-chlorinated waterparks. Without googling – because clearly that’s not a good idea for me at the moment – I don’t recall that the amoeba is any less common in tap water than in lakes or ponds (but there may be something about still water that encourages its growth), so my guess is that the vigor with which a person inhales the water (viz snorting some when you tumble off of a raft versus gently aspirating a bit while standing upright) has an effect on whether the amoeba is able to take hold (now I’m thinking of the nose as a pneumatic tube to the brain).
If it were so easy to contract naegleria fowleri from showering and sniffing a little too indiscriminately, huge numbers of people would be dead. As is, I don’t think anyone has ever died from tap-associated n.f., and if they have, I bet it was from using a neti pot (ie forcing water high up into your nasal cavity) without boiling or sterilizing the water first (DON’T DO THIS). I will probably continue to avoid the “drinking water upside down” hiccup cure trick (a popular one when I was a child, second only to a spoonful of sugar), though, as one time I did it and the water all came running out my nose.
Perhaps contradictorily, I’m probably less concerned with what goes in my mouth than most people are. Er – what I mean is that I’m not super fussed about an errant hair in my takeout order (just pluck it out) or carrots being 100% free of any peel that may still have slight dirt residue on it. But the other day I had assembled ingredients for dinner on my counter, then took advantage of the 25 minutes of tofu-baking to clean the kitchen floors a little bit. I sprayed all-purpose windex on a paper towel at about hip height, then immediately started to worry about the windex particles floating through the air (given that I could smell it) and settling onto my small bowl of minced garlic, being folded into the recipe, and killing me. Okay, not killing me, but sickening me. And that’s why (in addition to not being a dum dum spraying windex at hip height near prepared food) I prefer non-windex forms of cleaners, like white vinegar. But I also recognize that, much like standing in the shower worrying about brain-eating amoebas, this is a spike in concern that probably means I need to think about the level of worry I’m experiencing, even if I’m also joking about it.
Now I have “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes! (knees and toes!)” in my head, but the Latin version.
