Just Call Me Van Gogh

My left ear was the last straw.

As Mr. Handsome so succinctly put it, "Can't anything on you work?"

Well, I guess the short answer to that would be, "Apparently not."

I thought today we'd start taking a closer look at my various body parts, one by one, to give you an idea of who I am, or perhaps, what I'm not.

In today's lesson, we have the head. Overall, not bad. Head coverage, that is. My hair is usually pretty good. My crowning glory. Yes, I have to over-condition it now that I'm aging, so that it doesn't come out of the shower looking like an old Brillo pad. But, in the grand scheme of overall bodily function, it's no problemo.

Then, we come to the skull and the brain within. Lots of headaches. Bad ones. Bad bad migraines that at times cripple me, and make me lie in the fetal position on the bed, sucking my left thumb and whimpering. Been dealing with those since I was four years old, actually. No one believed me back then, however. I told my parents I couldn't eat hot dogs or birthday cake icing, but they wouldn't believe me. So, I'd eat it, and then be violently ill for the rest of the day. Sort of my way of telling them "I told you so." I wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed.

I also had a weird scalp affliction at one point, some kind of follicular infection, but it went away on its own. Thank god for small miracles.

Then we have my eyes. Yeah, let's talk about them for a moment, shall we? Extreme nearsightedness from an early age, which didn't help the eventual multiple retinal detachments in my early 20s. Ever have a big needle in your eye? I have. Ever have lasers shoot beams of heat into the backs of your eyes to heal a hemorrhage or a detachment? I have. Ever have a band of hard material surgically implanted in the back of your eye to save your vision? Yup. I have. Don't ever tell me I don't know how to have a good time.

My right retina detached again a couple of years ago when Mr. Handsome punched me in the eye. You should have seen the doctors' faces when I told them what had happened. They asked me, and I told them my husband had punched me. You could immediately see their little brains whirring as they tried to pull phone numbers and names out of their heads for me. They got all serious and everything, asking me if I was being abused.

Let me tell you, it was my moment of glory. Because although I'm sure they get their fair share of abuse victims strolling through their days, I am not one of them. But boy, did I love their reaction, and I'm all about reactions!

And then, of course, I told them it was all an accident, which it was. Mr. Handsome was playing with the dog, and suddenly the huge rubber wheel and rope toy that the dog had solidly grasped in his mouth came out, and BAM! Mr. Handsome's fist met my eyeball. And thereby was born my fourth retinal detachment. Said detachment resulted in laser surgery, and then a hemorrhage, which resulted in more laser surgery. In case you're wondering, laser eye surgery really really hurts. I made Mr. Handsome come with me the second time, so that I could break his fingers as I squeezed them during the session, and so that he could witness my pain. I'm nothing if I'm not about sharing both the good and the bad in this marriage.

And now I have many more floaters (those little bothersome blackish things that float around in your eye and make life miserable when you're trying to read or look at something bright), which sometimes completely obliterate the vision in my right eye. I also have cataracts happening in both eyes, which apparently shouldn't be happening until I'm in my late 60s, but that seems to be the way I roll.

So, because I am a good wife, I occasionally let Mr. Handsome know how awful these floaters are, and how worried I am that someday I will go completely blind. And I wait for his sympathy, for his empathy, for any semblance of his deep and unending feelings for me.

I'll let you know when that happens.

Below the eyes we have the nose. the nose that has done me so well for most of my life. That is, until I got the Excess Mucus problem, couple with the Allergies, which make blowing said nose a minute-by-minute experience some days. Oh, it's a pleasure to sit with me, to sleep beside me, to be anywhere within a ten yard radius of me and my beloved nose.

The good thing about my nose, though, is that I can smell anything before anyone else. Days before others notice the guinea pig cage is starting to reek, I know. I can tell if Mr. Handsome has laid an extra bold bomb in the upstairs bathroom even when I'm in the basement. People come to me first when they want to know whether some food has gone bad or can be eaten. This nose will do me well when one of my kids comes home and I smell the Cigarette Smoke on them. I can hardly wait.

Umm, I'm thinking maybe this isn't such a good thing, and should actually be thrown into the bad column.

The mouth comes next. Can't say a lot about it, except that I get the occasional canker sore from stress or fever, and have teeth that seem to develop holes in them no matter how many times a day I brush and floss.

Oh, and then there was the time I went to visit my friend Mich out west, taking Em with me (she was only 18 months old at the time), and Mich ran a daycare out of her home, and a couple of the kids were getting over Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease, something which I had never heard of before, and which I soon learned everything and then some about when first Em came down with it hard, and then I did. And, boy, did I. High fever for four days, I could do nothing but sleep and whimper, and then the sores appeared on the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet. But the best part? The best part were the nine canker sores that popped up on my upper lip seemingly overnight, and festered there for days, putting on an encore on the plane on the way back home. Definitely a sight to behold.

Last, but not least, we have the ears. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, my left ear no longer does the job an ear is supposed to do. If I block my right ear, all I hear are underwater sounds, hissing, whistling, and humming. I think it's a sinus thing, but seriously? This has been going on for a few years now, fluctuating in its seriousness, from very mild to extremely annoying and frustrating.

Right now, I'm at the latter extreme. I'm now at the point where I think I have to go to a specialist who can either unplug me, or tell me I don't need that ear any longer because I will no longer hear out of it, and maybe they can cut it off right then and there so that I have less washing to do, and can have even more spare earrings, and can then be called Mary Van Gogh, because I've always wanted to be known as an artist.

And that ends our first lesson on my body parts. Next time, the Upper Torso.