the perils of good hygiene

I am never clipping my toenails again.

Thursday night I was sitting at the edge of my bed clipping my toenails when a fragment flew up into my right eye. It hurt like bloody hell. I clapped my hand over my eye and shot to the bathroom to wash it out and press a cold wet washcloth against it. After five or ten minutes the pain eased, though the eye didn't feel its usual slightly impaired but chipper self; but I was tired, so I went to bed.

Friday morning I woke up late and in the rush forgot all about my eye. But as the morning at work progressed, the eye kept getting more cranky. When I rolled it far to the right, I felt a sharp prick against my eyeball beneath the upper lid, in the corner by my nose. By lunchtime I was frantically flushing it out with a bulb syringe while the kids ate and ran around before naptime. By the time Meg got the last kid down for a nap, my eye was swollen and red, but no matter how many times I turned the lid inside out, I couldn't see anything in the tiny hand mirror that we had in the room.

"I'm going to the bathroom to check in better light," I told Meg and one of the volunteers, who were both looking at me with that pitying aw-poor-crazy-girl expression. "Maybe it's nothing and I've worked it all up by rubbing at it, but I'm going to see, just to make sure, and then I'll leave it alone."

In the bathroom I flipped on the beautiful fluorescent lights and leaned close to the mirror. I turned up my eyelid and slid out, not a tiny fragment as I had thought, but an entire toenail clipping, crescent shape and all, preserved completely intact inside my eye. It had turned to fit the curvature of my eyeball.

I swallowed a post-traumatic panic attack and went running back to the room to show Meg and Carolyn what had been lodged in my eye. Meg said a very naughty word in disbelief (fear not, the kids sleep in another room); Carolyn started patting my shoulder.

My eye has felt much better ever since. (Poor eye.) I've been told that I'm the only person who would need to wear goggles to keep her toenails trimmed.

Or at least my glasses. I'll approach toenail-clipping much less casually, henceforth. Who knew good hygiene habits could be so dangerous?