For close to a month now, I’ve been having trouble with one of my eyes. It’s been red and itchy, and even drained a little, but because it was only irritated on one side, I didn’t think it was full blown conjunctivitis.

Like low grade pink eye, the symptoms seemed to go away on their own after a couple of weeks. Not 2 days after I thought I was in the clear did the symptoms return on the opposite side of my eye.

This went on for another week, making me think that I had some mutant strain of low-grade pink eye that had the ability to reinfect itself. I responded by wearing my glasses, washing my hands a lot, and being very careful to avoid touching my eyes. I even developed a pattern of only touching my eyes with the hand on the same side of the body to avoid spreading the issue any further.

Again, the eye itched and drained a little, but there weren’t boogers everywhere, so I waited for it to run its course. Another week later, it did. After that, I was cured… until it came back a couple of days later, then went away, then came back again, and so on for yet another week.

Today, I got up and the eye felt crappier than it had since this started four weeks ago, and I had no choice but to wear my glasses. It was so bad, that during the morning commute, glancing over my right shoulder to switch lanes was making me wince as if I was being poked in the eye. After several lane changes, all discipline went out the window, and I started rubbing my eye like lunatic to try to relieve the burning.

And something glopped onto my cheek. And my eye felt instantly better.

“Oh now you’ve done it,” I thought. “They tell you not to rub it, you rubbed it, and now you’ve unleashed full blown pink eye. All this being careful and now there’s a big booger on your cheek. Nice job.”

I swiped at the glob on my cheek to get a better look at the first example of the massive boogers that I thought would be gracing my eyelids over the coming weeks, but before I could, it flipped off my finger and onto my lap. Because I was in heavy traffic, I quickly realized that the several quick looks I could spare for my crotchal region weren’t going to be enough to triangulate the location of said megabooger until I got off the road.

When I finally parked the car and did some searching for what I swore was going to be big enough to require a kleenex with +2d6 damage against boogers, it took me almost a minute to piece together what I found. Some night a month ago, as I was pulling a video game dried, disposable contact lens from my eye, half of it had somehow remained behind and lodged itself up in my eye socket. It then remained there for the last month to become the beaten up, wet, boogery half of a contact lens that I held in my hand.

Posted in Strange