I did not die in my sleep

I see that as largely good news.

See, yesterday morning, my left eyelid felt a bit scratchy. I ignored it cuz I had a lot of yardwork to do, and during allergy season, my eyes are often not feeling perfect. I went out with MaxieC and put down weedkiller on all our weeds. 4 gallons of weedkiller it took, and we only sprayed it directly on weeds, not on the whole lawn. I used Ortho Weed-B-Gone. It works very well and doesn't kill the grass like Round-Up does.

After that, I went to work rototilling the garden. Last year I used a big, rear-tine rental tiller. This year, I had 1/2" drip line all around plus a bunch of perennials (strawberries, raspberries, and asparagus) that I needed to negotiate. The big tiller would never be manageable. So, I borrowed Rico's front tine tiller. I had done an hour of tilling on Saturday evening, and I had gotten about another hour into the tilling Sunday morning when I just couldn't stand my scratchy eye anymore. I went inside to take out my contacts.

When I looked in the mirror, I noticed that my eye was fine, but my eyelid was all swollen up. I showed The Mrs. and asked if she thought I should head over to Urgent Care. She insisted on driving me there, in case they decided to give me a shot in my eyelid and I couldn't drive back.

So we packed up the family into the minivan and headed to urgent care. The Mrs. is one of those people who zooms up to stop signs and then slams on the brakes. I often have to close my eyes when she's driving. But she's never crashed, whereas I have a couple times. So who am I to criticize? (Plus, she was upset that I focused my last post too much on her sister and not enough on her, and so I need to make sure I'm extra-critical of her in this one.)

Speaking of which, HannahC got "grounded" today. I asked what that meant and was told it meant dinner, schoolwork, then straight to bed with no computer and no TV. She's up there right now watching YouTube videos with The Mrs., and it's past her normal bedtime.

I hope The Mrs. gets much better at this "grounded" business before HannahC is a teenager. Right now, she sucks at it.

Anyways, I sit around for like an hour waiting to see a doctor. He looks at my eye and says there are a few things it could be. Could be an allergy or a blocked tear duct or a side-effect of one of the meds I'm on. After close examination, he rules out blocked tear duct.

Then he goes on a long spiel about how one of the side-effects of this drug is something called "angioedema", which he described as a leaking of the capillaries and how, if that was the case, we'd need to take it very seriously, as it would be potentially life-threatening. Then he tells me how there's no real way for him to tell whether it's allergies or this drug side-effect or what, but that's he pretty sure it's nothing serious cuz the drug side effect only affect 0.25% of people, and it's usually much more of your face that swells up, not just an eyelid.

But just to be sure, he's going to check with the other doctor on duty.

He came back about 10 minutes later and said, "Yeah, she never heard of it starting as just an eyelid either. It's probably nothing. But watch it and if it gets worse or starts to spread, go to the ER."

He then sent me off with instructions to take Benedryl before bed. Benedryl makes you kinda loopy. So all night I'm in this semi-drug stupor, except I keep having to feel my face all over to make sure it wasn't swelling anywhere lest I become in danger of imminent death, but when you're half asleep and drugged up on Benedryl, a little itch can seem like the end of the world.

I think I slept quite well, given that.

The swelling seems to have largely subsided now. I will never know the cause.