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I’ve been doing a lot of research on fibromyalgia lately, but I’ve discovered that a great majority of books on the subject were written before the advances of the past few years. This was especially brought home to me yesterday when I was reading to my husband a passage from a book written in 1998. If you felt a great eruption yesterday, don’t worry; that was just my engineer husband’s response to the helpful instructions stating that, “The World Wide Web is the segment of the Internet with graphics.”

That really wasn’t what I had in mind when I dreamed about finding other people who share my love of all things “ass”.

My response: “Ooh, it’s just like the wise men bringing gifts to baby Jesus.”

My Uncle: Um, I don’t know. I wasn’t there.

“I don’t have any secrets from you,” I told my husband.

“I know!” he replied. Due to some quirk in my own personal makeup, I can neither lie nor keep secrets. It’s like any kind of secret information is a foreign body in my system, and I must vomit it up and out as soon as possible in order to keep my system running smoothly.

“What about you?” I asked him. “Do you have any secrets?”

“Nope,” he said, and we went back to watching the show.

In the next scene Dr. “Ducky” Mallard is talking to Agent Gibbs about the corpse he is examining. “I got a hunch and I decided to trim his (the corpse’s) nose hair,” said Dr. Mallard.

At this my husband pauses the show (all hail the awesomeness of TIVO!), leaps up off the couch, and says, “Oh yeah, I do have a secret from you.”*

Oh, dear sweet Lord In Heaven, I thought to myself, completely panicked. What the hell kind of secret does “nose hair” remind you of?!

“Um, that’s okay, dude,” I said, backing away from him. “You can just go ahead and keep that particular secret to yourself.”

*It turned out all right, though. For some reason I still don’t completely understand, that just reminded him that he’d brought me back a present from Mexico.

I was able to put my contacts in almost on the first try (although I did briefly revert to being 8 years old again when I had to ask my husband to please, please, STOP LOOKING AT ME while I did it.) So I was feeling good about that.

And then once they were in I went to work out, and I was feeling really good about that, because this will be my tenth week in a row of regular exercise.

But apparently that was just too much good feeling in one morning for me, because I had only been walking on the treadmill for about ten minutes when I rubbed my eye and accidentally popped my contact out.

Fortunately I did not lose it, but I did then have to figure out what I was going to do. My first instinct was to leave and go back home, which would have been awkward but doable. The place where I work out is not a regular gym, but instead is a by-appointment-only kind of place, which means that everyone knows who you are, and they notice when you come in, and they notice when you leave, and they have no qualms whatsoever about following you out into the parking lot and stopping you from driving away if they think you’ve left too quickly.

But I could deal with that. What was more difficult to deal with was the fact that my trainer arrived at that exact moment to work with another of her clients and I was instantly faced with an even more important dilemma, namely that of preventing her from changing the setting on my treadmill from the level at which I felt I could actually walk and still ensure the delivery of oxygen to my entire body, to the level at which she felt I SHOULD be working out (my level being, “Oh, The Burning!”, and her level being, “Spontaneous Combustion And Death!”)

So I stayed, clutching my contact the whole time, and when I finally escaped to my car I realized that I was so a person who’d had contacts for less than four days. Because, did I have my contact case, or my contact solution, or my glasses, or anything even remotely resembling an eye care product? Um, no. I had…an empty granola bar wrapper plucked hastily from the floor, thus ensuring that when I finally made it back home my contact would resemble nothing so much as a colorless, hideously deformed Shrinky Dink.

And I was left to wonder (yet again) at the fact that somehow I am allowed to be the person in charge of my own self care, and to fear for the other living beings who depend on me.