Hi I'm Here To Complain

I promised a blog last week and didn’t deliver so I’m sorry to my tens of fans (hi, Mom!).  I have a good excuse.  Everything north of my boobs revolted against me.

I took a trip to Okinawa for work, the last week of February/first week of March.  I was there to meet colleagues who I normally only communicate with via email, and provide training on project scheduling.  Okinawa did not at all feel like Japan – it felt like Hawaii, where I’ve never been so I am entirely unqualified to say that – but it had a laid back, island feel to it.  A stark departure from the insane pace of Tokyo.

Everything was awesome – my hotel was beachfront, I spent my off hours wandering around and exploring.  It was beautiful and serene.  On my final day there, I was giving a presentation and something happened.  

I’ll provide two examples, it will be fun, like a choose-your-own-adventure.

Do you wear contact lenses?  If no, proceed to the next paragraph.  If yes, it felt like I had put my left contact lens in INSIDE OUT and also there was a mascara-covered eyelash under it.  

Oh hi, non-contact lens wearers.  Imagine you take a wine glass, and you smash it on your countertop, then you take a rolling pin and grind the shards into a fine dust, and then you dump that into your eye.

I had to apologize and excuse myself multiple times to go to the bathroom and sop up the fountain of tears pouring from my eye and pep talk myself in the mirror to not rip my entire eyeball out of its socket.  I was having a flare-up of what is called giant papillary conjunctivitis which I have experienced a few times since I started wearing lenses when I was 12.  Don’t Google it.  It’s gross.  As my ophthalmologist told me when I was a teenager and this first occurred, “this is a stay-at-home-on-a-Saturday-night kind of thing”. 

I flew home the next day in agony.  When we woke up on Saturday, I was still in so much pain that I told Jan I couldn’t do anything but rock in the corner and figure out how to atone for whatever sins brought this upon me.  For the first time since we moved to Japan, we stayed in on a Saturday night.  My ophthalmologist was right.

It finally faded and by Monday I was feeling back to normal.  Then the cedar pollen hit.  Hold on to your britches because cedar pollen may sound cute and delightful and full of NATURE, but NATURE IS A HUGE BITCH SOMETIMES, SHEILA.  

Here’s an excerpt from a New York Times article:

“The forests in this mountainous region were once verdant swaths of oak, maple and numerous other kinds of broadleaf trees and evergreens. But after World War II, Government bureaucrats applied their aggressive industrial policies to the environment as well as the economy. In the process, they financed the replacement of what they saw as commercially useless natural forests with more economically productive trees. 

For the most part, this extraordinary experiment in environmental engineering has involved planting a single species, the Japanese cedar, because of the usefulness of its wood and the speed of its growth. As a result, Japan now has the largest tracts of cedar on earth, with this scenic region around Mount Fuji, long regarded as a symbol of the nation, among the most densely planted. 

The aim was to make the country self-sufficient in wood products, but the widespread sensitivities to cedar pollen are just one indication of how this single-minded strategy has gone awry.”

It is cedar pollen season, and cedar pollen is here to fuck your life up.

I woke up on Tuesday with this horrible, deep chest cough.  I didn’t feel sick, I just couldn’t stop coughing.  I went to work as usual.  By Wednesday, I had coughed more than I have coughed in my entire life and my vocal chords went on strike.  I could barely speak and my coworkers looked at me like I was a dying frog every time I attempted to croak out “good morning”.  

“You sound HORRIBLE!” they would say.  To which I would attempt to communicate through a series of blinks and hand gestures because speaking was no longer something I was capable of.  If you know me, you know that this amounts to the greatest punishment I can imagine aside from maybe taking wine away from me.

By Wednesday, it hurt to breath and any attempts at speech outed me as the 80-year-old lifelong 5-packs a day smoker that I secretly am.  It also settled into my sinuses and every time I sneezed, I would cough for 5 solid minutes.

Thursday I started to feel a little better.  The coughing was starting to subside slightly, and I could actually make out a couple of audible syllables here and there.  Yay!  I survived my first cedar pollen attack intact (heh), and relief was on the horizon.

That is until I woke up on Friday.

Friday was my day off, to make up for traveling to Okinawa on a Sunday.  I instead spent the entire day waiting to be seen at the base medical clinic because my eardrums were most certainly about to burst.  I knew this because they were throbbing and every time I coughed or swallowed they sent a surge of pain and whispered “you’ve subjected us to 90’s pop music for the last time, bitch”. 

So long story long, I was sent home with a bag full of medication and a netipot which I am too afraid to use because I feel like it’s the pseudo-medical version of waterboarding and it will drown me in my bathroom.  Well, the medication worked wonders because it made me loopy and sleepy and I woke up this morning, Saturday, feeling brand new.

It’s early afternoon on Saturday here, and Jan has secret plans for us.  I don’t know what they are, aside from we’re hopping the train to Shinjuku in a couple hours.  This will be an early White Day present… White Day in Japan is celebrated exactly a month after Valentines Day.  On Valentines Day here, it is traditional for women to shower men with gifts, and they return the favor the next month on White Day.

Less complain-ey blog with pictures coming up this weekend after we get into whatever trouble we’re about to get into…

Since this was so complain-ey, shout-out to everyone I know who has dealt with serious medical conditions (love you Addie, if you’re reading this…).  You da real MVP.