The Stye is a Pig

Two days after my return from Cumbria, I felt a sensation as if a needle had pricked my eyelid and knew, with immense annoyance, that the Wandering Stye had picked the lower lid on my left eye to put in his latest appearance.

You may be wondering why, as I am female, I refer to my ailments in the masculine gender. I can only apologise to all gentle, sensitive, tender-hearted, kind males and explain that, in general, all the things that have been the biggest pains in my life have been male. I mean, what female would poke me in the eye and arrange a big swelling for first thing in the morning? (Er.... OK. I shan't continue in this slightly double-entendre-ish vein.) But I think you're starting to get the picture.

My styes are caused by staring too long at the computer screen. This dries out the eyes, the lids get pink and irritated and bingo! A stye. I found a tube of Brolene, bunged some on, then noticed
the warning words, 'discard 4 weeks after opening'. It must have lurked in my cupboard for at least 4 months. So off I popped to the local chemist's where, after a twenty-minute conversation about how life was much better in ye olde days when there were no televisions, computers, iPods or mobile phones and we all lived cheek by jowl with assorted relatives in a house lit by one electric light which, when turned on, provided us with the entertainment of seeing a thousand cockroaches skitter away to their homes beneath the floorboards, I was sold a new tube of eye ointment.

My ears ringing with memories of the 'party pieces' all children used to have to learn and trot out at every family party (mine, in case you're wondering, was Lord Ullin's Daughter, complete with hair-tearing, chest-beating and melodramatic sobs as 'the waters wild washed o'er his child and he was left lamenting'), I trotted home, opened the tube and found the garrulous sales assistant had mistakenly given me drops for conjunctivitis instead of oitment for styes.

Then I remembered a remedy I'd once resorted to on a wet day in Turkey after spending all day in an internet cafe sending off my novel to my agent (it was rejected :-<). Tea Tree Cream. Now, that tube had lived in my medicine cupboard (yes, it's the size of the average fridge-freezer, how did you guess) for at least a year and probably contains sundry other ingredients by now such as grains of sand, cat hairs and the odd leg from a squashed mosquito. Whatever the resulting potion, I don't think even eye of newt and tit of bat could improve it. One blob before going to bed (where I did seventeen rounds with the Busy Brain Syndrome until resorting to the last ditch method - see next posting) and my stye has come to a head and the pain is much relieved.

Now that I know that the Wandering Stye can be clobbered by Tea Trea ointment, I can stop buying tiny tubes that have to be thrown out after four weeks, where they end up in some land fill site being eaten by red-eyed rats the size of badgers, whose fur is glossy from all the discarded hair products and whose faces are wrinkle-free from all that snuffling about in oozing tubes of Anusol.