So when this day started off, I was feeling really good.

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.