My friends know that I occasionally suffer from migraine headaches. When one of those suckers is coming on, I see flashing lights, auras and the soft sounds of my children breathing or pressing the buttons on the x-box controllers are enough to send me right over the edge. The only thing that helps is to lay in a dark room, put ice on my head, take powerful drugs, and hide all of the x-box controllers.
I started feeling the tell-tale signs Sunday afternoon, after a rousing family trip to Costco where we spent almost $400 on food and a two-pack of ink for my HP printer, which is now WAY more expensive than gold per ounce. I ignored the signs, however, because if I take my migraine medication it puts me to sleep, making it difficult to harass my children into cleaning their rooms and walking the dog. Also, we had invited my in-laws over for dinner.
After we arrived back in North Bend, I had my husband stop at the grocery store because, shocker, even with $400 worth of food and printer ink in the back of the car I still didn't have everything I needed to cook dinner. I purchased basil and a couple of green chili peppers at Safeway and then we headed home to unload the mountain of Costco purchases and cook dinner. I knew my headache was coming, but I figured I could make it past dinner and then head straight to bed. I should have listened to my head, however.
I was making a new recipe, roasted chicken with grape tomatoes and basil. The chili peppers were to add a little heat to the sauce. I de-seeded a pepper and sliced it according to the recipe instructions. Because I watch the Food Network, I remembered to wash my hands several times to remove all of the capsaicin, which as every budding home cook knows, can linger on your hands and cause you to burn your eyes and mouth and other soft tissues of unmentionable nature. After dinner, I told everyone that I was just going to have to go to bed because my headache was getting worse and I excused myself to wallow in my own misery.
I went in to my room and started preparing to head to bed. First, I took out my contacts. Actually, I say 'first' but in reality it was the first and last thing I did. Why, you ask? Because as soon as I put my finger in my eye to pull out my right contact, I felt a burning which I would equate to placing my eyeball directly onto a stove burner. Blinking back tears, I muttered how stupid I was and I washed my hands several times and then moved on to my left eye. Amazingly, it hurt even MORE than the right eye, similar to dousing it with alcohol and then placing it directly onto the surface of the sun. I dug around for my contact blindly, but couldn't get a grip on it. More burning. I flushed my eye with contact solution, washed my hands AGAIN and went back for another go. MORE BURNING. Three more tries and I was now wiping the apparently irremovable pepper toxins and remnants of soap all over the entire surface of my eyeball, and I had yet to extract my contact. At that point, I was willing to just go to sleep and let my eye fuse shut permanently, contact and all. So, I took my migraine medication and staggered, weeping, over to the bed and crawled under the covers,
When I awoke the next morning, my headache was still there, but thankfully my eye was blessedly not fused permanently shut, and it didn't burn anymore. I went over to the sink to throw away my other contact because I figured that if I wasn't able to wash my hands enough to get rid of the evil pepper juice, no amount of soaking over night was going to take it off either. Then, I attempted to locate my left contact. I fished around in my eye, but I couldn't find it. I searched again, but no luck. It was when I looked down into the sink that, lo and behold, I saw it, shriveled up near the drain. I wonder now how many times I unnecessarily probed and prodded my eyeball after the damn thing had fallen out. At least three. And there was the time that I thought I had the contact but instead was actually pinching the surface of my eyeball in a last desperate attempt to remove it. I'm sure it just fell out on its own in a tide of tears sometime after the second attempt.
Is there a moral to this story? Yeah. I just don't know what it is right now. Something to do with peppers and migraines and refusing to cook dinner for my in-laws ever again. I'll figure it out eventually.
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