You know how it is when you cut yourself on a pair of pruning shears that have a tiny little spec of rust on the handle, and you sort of just assume you have tetanus.  Or when you sleep funny on your arm and then you wake up with a cramp and you’re pretty sure you’re having a heart attack– even though you know you were crushing your arm all night with your head?

Me too.

So then you try to convince yourself that you’re just being silly.  That no one ever got tetanus from a little rust and that heart attacks only happen to fat old men.  But still, you wonder.

I had a similar experience the other day.  First I cut my finger on a pair of pruning shears that had a tiny little spec of rust on the handle and the next morning I woke up with a cramp in my arm.  I talked myself out of my fear of tetanus as well as my fear of heart disease by reminding myself that the rust never actually touched my finger and that I’m on a low fat diet, and not a man.  But then a bug flew in my eye while I was hiking in the Alpine Boy Scout Camp.

I saw it fly toward me and I definitely felt the impact as it slammed its tiny body against my eyeball. I even felt it move a little in there.

But then it just seemed to disappear.

And that’s when the panic set in.

“If it flew in, it had to have flown out. That’s what bugs do. It’s a way of life for them.  They fly in.  They fly out.” I explained to myself.

  But still, I wondered.

The problem was that I never actually saw the bug fly out, and it still felt like there was a foreign body lodged under my lid.

“That’s how it always feels when a bug flies into your eye, and then out again. It feels as though he’s still in there because your eye has its own little built-in imagination. How else do you think people are able to hallucinate?” I said to myself soothingly as I continued hiking down my little trail while flailing my arms around my face in order to deter any other insects from flying into my eyes.  Occasionally I would stop the flailing to pull my top lid over my bottom lid and roll my eye around.  Nothing came out though.  So then I pulled my upper eyelid away from my eyeball and waved my hand in front of it, hoping that if, in fact, the bug was still alive, I would free it by creating a little wind tunnel.  But no.  Not even a dismembered wing dropped out.

“Even if he’s still in there, so what? It’s not like he’d be able to bite you in there.  It’s too slippery.  Just forget it,” I said convincingly, and kept walking. 

Eventually I managed to assure myself that my eye was just irritated from the attack and that by the time I got home and rinsed it out, it would all be forgotten.

And then I started running.  I ran over rocks and streams and dead branches. I ran over spiders and mud puddles and at least a mile of quick sand, until I was safely back to my car (actually I’m pretty sure that wasn’t quick sand, but it was something).  I opened the door and sat down and pulled the rearview mirror toward me.  And there was the bug.  He was sitting right there, on the white part of my outer eye, in full view.  He was dead of course, and flat as a pancake, and thankfully, he never bit me. But the fact remains that no matter how I tried to convince myself otherwise, the “silly” part of me was right. There was definitely a bug in my eye the whole time I was rationalizing it away. Just as I suspected.

Which, unfortunately, brings me to that little cramp in my arm and the tiny cut on my finger.