get your sleep

I'm one of those people that gets 8 hours of sleep a night. Not because I prefer it....but because I need it to function. For the past three nights I've had maybe two hours tops each night. Restless. Nervous energy keeping me awake. Brain unable to shut down and body unable to relax to get any much needed rest. Have you ever been so incredibly tired that you can't hardly think straight? But you can't sleep?

I had a black eye through the holidays due to a freak hide-n-seek accident while playing with the dogs. It was sooo bad. I mean bad. Like movie make-up bad. I had a direct hit on the weakest point high on my cheekbone. Ouch. Major ouch. So I took some aspirin because I thought, "this is going to hurt like hell later".

Well, yeah. It did. It hurt like bloody hell. But it was the aspirin that did the most damage. Can you say "Blood Thinner". Duh. My 'trying to be good to my body' and not take any of those other pain killers, Acetaminophen/Ibuprofen, that have warnings printed on one entire side of the bottle. Aspirin...good ol' miracle drug, aspirin.

When I woke in the morning the left side of my face was completely swollen, the white of my eye blood red, the bruise running all the way down my face to my chin line. I was shocked. I went to the doctor to have them look at it. There couldn't possibly have been this much damage from that fall! My face! And right before the Christmas holiday. No parties for me this year. No shopping. No lunching with friends.

So they gave it an ex-ray and here was this hairline crack. The doctor asked me if I had taken anything for it..and I proudly announced, "Why, yes. Aspirin. The miracle cure-all. So much better for my body and liver than those others". You should have seen his face....apparently that's the LAST thing I should have done. So what might have been still a rather bad black eye now looked as if I had taken on Evander Holyfield and lost in the 8th round.

So I spent the entirety of the normal Christmas shopping season, where one usually goes about drinking Chai tea while strolling the heated sidewalks of ritzy shopping centers...I was stuck in my home office, shopping online so as to not scare small children. Poor timing. Had it been Halloween I would've won every costume event. As it was, even at my local drugstore, where they see me every week, they would be silent as mice while giving me the total of my purchase.

The Christmas photos this year, I look rather cheeky with my face turned....away from the camera.

So, here it is seven weeks later and the most of the swelling is down, the red in the eye gone...but still a hint of bruising under my eye. NOW combine that with my recent lack of sleep, the other eye has a dark circle so deep that they both look the same. At least now I'm uniform. I had begun to think that if the swelling wasn't going to go down I'd have to have a cheek implant on the right side. Now it just looks as if I've been bopped on the bridge of my nose with BOTH eyes dark. How fun for me.

I wonder how it's going to look when out skiing this week in the bright sunlight on the stark white snow. Thank God large sunglasses are back in fashion...I'll just look like I'm a bunny from Vail.

Note to self: Don't ever play in the dark with the dogs again. Don't take any medication until referencing the Internet first for solutions. And get plenty enough sleep!

But my sunglasses sure to do make me look like a movie star.....now to find the solution when out at night. The glasses just don't cut it after dark.
:-)