Maiden voyage

A blog is born. It was relatively painless. Welcome to whomever is reading this–I am mopsy. A wife, a mother of five. Daughter of God and my parents.

Folding laundry is dangerous business, as I discovered yesterday and Dr. Stanley at ImmediaCare will confirm. My insurance company will looovvvee this particular claim, the kind the data-entry folk talk about in the breakroom over their Lean Cuisines.

I was folding laundry, a task I normally really enjoy. The repetitive folding, the growing stacks of organized clean cotton really speaks to my heart–my rumpled heart that craves to be folded. So to speak.

Anyway, I was hoisting a laundry basket and felt something zing my left eye. I went to the bathroom and looked into the mirror, expecting to find an errant eyelash or a piece of laundry fuzz. Instead, I saw a chunk of white plastic lodged in the center of my eye. Nice!

I moved my eyeball and lid around to see if the chunk would move. I thought it was merely resting on my cornea, but it dug in its chunky heels and would not budge. I think it stuck its tongue out at me. Bastard! Time to get out the big guns–wet Q-Tips. I thought of my children on the loose downstairs and pondered the possibility of pulling an Oedipus on myself. I would hate to gouge my eye out and scare them, but the chunk was quite uncomfortable. So with trembling hand, I swiped at my eyeball a few times with numerous Q-Tips, all to no avail. The chunk was now saying “nanny-nanny-boo-boo” at me! I knew I needed help.

I made a tearful call to my husband’s cell phone, knowing he was on his way home from work. I got his voice mail, where I left a tearful plea to come home ASAP, due to the fact that I had a stubborn chunk of something jutting out of my eye. Slowly, the tearful realization dawned on me that I would need to seek professional help–which made me more tearful. Visions (limited to my good eye) of the local ER began to fill my head–hacking lungs, bloody stumps, heart attacks, and me–the woman with a laundry basket in her eye. I would be frightfully low on the triage list.

So what now? We consulted our refrigerator magnets, of course. Several months ago someone left a flier on our front door advertising a place called ImmediaCare. As a handy gift, the flier included a soft magnet in the shape of a bandaid, with the phone number. I called the number and explained my situation. The woman on the other end said they could handle everything my eye could dish out. We gathered the kids, brilliantly brought along a DVD for the entertainment of said kids, and left. Tearfully.

I arrived at ImmediaCare, and was relieved to see that it was clean, well-lit, well-staffed, and they were expecting me. After filling out the usual paperwork, I was taken back to the “Eye Room”. My eye was numbed with a liquid that must have been bottled by Tabasco Inc. It burned. Then my eye was dyed a lovely yellowy-orange. A blue light was directed at my now-numbed eye and Dr. Stanley got a good look at the chunk, which was writing out its will because the big guns had arrived.

Dr. Stanley snapped on latex gloves and opened the sterile packet which contained his high-tech tool-of-the-trade–a really big Q-Tip. He removed the laundry basket with ease and grace. Thank God he was there the day Medical School covered housewife injuries. After splooging antibiotic gel into my eye, and covering it with a pirate patch, I was free to go and be ridiculed and stared at by my small children. One thought my eye patch was a hard-boiled egg.

So, my first blog entry is complete. That was painless! Not.

mopsy