Shower of Sorrow

I am about to relate to you a very personal and traumatic experience.  It has taken me several weeks to recover from the trauma sufficiently to share.  Some things are just too life altering to process all at once, they are moments you never fully recover from.  I am afraid this was one of those moments. 

To set the scene for you I must give you an idea of what my morning schedule consists of.  I work five days a week at one of the best jobs ever.  Sadly, it's a 40 minute drive from my house and when you add on a 9hr work day I find am not prone to working out at the end of my shift.  To avoid ballooning into a smurf like character and to avoid valley traffic I wake up around 4:15 in the morning and get on the road by 5am.  This allows me about 45minutes to work out prior to my 7am on duty time.  Not wanting to be sweaty and gross all day I take a shower before changing into my work clothes.

Normally this entire process, besides the waking up part, is a relatively easy and stress relieving part of my day.  The morning work out puts me in an awesome mood and gets me ready to face the day.  Typically by the time I am taking my shower I am awake and happy enough to be singing along to my workout music. (that's right folks, I sing in the shower and feel no shame over it) 

Tuesday morning two weeks ago, instead of singing I found myself weeping like a child who just found out their favorite vanilla ice cream had been replaced with horseradish sauce. (I'm sorry I ever played that trick on you Kat.) Here's what happened...

I had an awesome workout and was feeling particularly beasty.  I hopped in the shower and started singing along with Beyonce like any other day.  Mentally I started going over my 'to do' list while going through a quick shower process. You know....face, hair then body. (I like doing things in a specific order as does anyone with a type A personality.  Don't act like I'm the only weirdo out there, I know all of you type A's are secretly thinking of your particular shower order as you read this.) Anyway, I had just gotten to the hair part and Put a nice dollop of shampoo in my hand with which I fully intended to scrub my scalp. (This is where things get ugly)

I remember lifting my right hand up toward my head when all at once I felt what can only be described as an intense and literally blinding pain shoot through my right eyeball.  While my vocal chords were straining with a blood curdling scream of pain (it went something along the lines of, "grrraaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh, oh God, oh God, please help me, aaaaaarrrrrrhhhhhh") my brain, scrambling to process what just happened, realized I had just dropped that entire dollop of shampoo into my eyeball. 

Eyes closed I threw myself against the tile wall of the shower for support while trying to force my eye open.  The pain was like a thousand paper knives slicing tiny paper cuts onto my eyeball while a giant lemon squeezed itself over my bare cornea.  I couldn't make my eyelids open. While trying to force my eyeball open I started yelling and whimpering all at once, "Oh, God what am I going to do?  I can't see, I can't see!! Oh Lord, it hurts so bad, it hurts so bad. Okay, Laura just breathe, your okay, it's going to be okay, just breathe.  Aaaaaahhhhhhh I hurts so bad, Oh God it hurts so bad!!"

In my mind I vaguely remembered my mother trying to rinse something out of my eye once and my reaction being somewhat similar.  Her voice rang somewhere in my head, "Laura if you don't rinse it out it's just going to hurt worse and worse.  You have to rinse it."  With my left eye opened I looked at the water blasting out of the shower head in front of me.  The terror I felt at the thought of holding my eye open under that deluge made me more sick than the shooting pain through my eyeball.  You have to understand, this shower is not typical.  The water pressure coming out of this shower is almost enough to blast the hair right off your legs for you.  Typically I keep myself moving around as I shower because the pressure is so high that to stand in one spot for too long would be asking for a surface abrasion on whatever part of your body was unfortunate enough to be subjected to your foolish stillness.  Knowing the pain this water pressure can cause on my skin I was less than excited at the prospect of opening my eyeball so it could be blasted by the liquid needles flying out at me.  But....I knew it had to be done.

Taking a deep breath I raised my face and felt the blades of water sear my skin as I slowly pried my eyelids apart. "Aaaaaahhhhhhhhh, it hurts so bad!" I screamed as I slammed my eyeball shut again.  Unfortunately shutting the eye hurt just as badly and I quickly peeled it back open yelling, "My eye, my eye it hurts so bad!!!"

Six times I went through this process trying to rinse all the shampoo out.  Halfway through I felt something on my upper lip that I thought was soap lingering on my face.  As I reached up to wipe it off I realized it was snot pouring out of my nose almost as quickly as the water was pouring into my eye. "Uuuuggggghhhhh gross, what the thunder is going on?" All I could think was the water was running right behind my eyeball and washing out my sinus cavity.  As if being blinded wasn't bad enough, now I had to be all gross and snotty on top of it?!  Was there no end to this horrendous episode?  Was I going to trip and knock myself out next?  Seriously!

After about six torturous washes under the shower I tested my eye out and found I could actually control my eyelids on their own and had a partially blurred view of the shower wall.  Good enough to stop with the water torture.  I quickly rinsed the last of the snot off my face and slowly, carefully finished my shower and got myself ready for the day.  As I looked into the mirror before heading out of the locker room I saw my eyeball was a beautiful red splotch that seemed to scream at everyone who might give it a second look, "She did this to me, she tried to kill me!".  Silently I wondered if the blurriness would go away as the day went on or if I would need to make a visit to the optometrist.  Thankfully I did not have to seek medical attention.

What is the point of this long, winding and embarrassing story?  Well, let my woes be a lesson to you.  When you are putting shampoo in your hair, you should keep your eyes closed.  And for the sake of your eyeballs....check your water pressure people, check your water pressure.