There’s a stye on my eye. Well…not exactly. The stye is actually on my eyelid, not my eye, but that doesn’t make for nearly as satisfying a rhyme.
Though I’ve never before had a stye, this isn’t the first time in my life something’s been wrong with my eyes. In addition to suffering from almost-lifelong nearsightedness and a droopy left lid, I once went through a period where I had conjunctivitis (called “pink eye” in cows but not humans) that kept coming back. I’ve had scratched corneas and dry eyes and sand in my eyes and bits of hay in my eyes and gnats in my eyes and a whole lot of other no-fun ophthalmic complaints.
But never in 71 years have I ever been diagnosed with a stye. Such an ailment was so unfamiliar I didn’t even know how to spell it.
I initially went with sty, without the e, which is considered an acceptable variant but which more commonly refers to an area where pigs live or—even more delightfully descriptive—to a place of bestial debauchery. That definition is from dictionary.com, which points out that this word often refers to someone’s lack of attention to housekeeping. As in “Your room is a PIG STY!!!”
When I first noticed the bump on my right eyelid three weeks ago, I assumed it was poison ivy. I’m cursed with poison ivy. Though I know exactly what it looks like growing up a tree, sometimes hiding amongst Virginia Creeper or English ivy, or at the edge of the woods where the lightning bugs congregate or even nestled in with the stuff that’s supposed to be growing in my flowerbed, and even though I do my darndest not to touch it and to always scrub my hands with hot soapy water whenever I’ve been outside, I spend a good deal of every summer with poison ivy rash.
The good news is that, although poison ivy in and around the eyes is dreadfully uncomfortable, it won’t make a person go blind. So yay.
And yay, too, for good timing. Before I could call my ophthalmologist and make an appointment to see about my eyelid affliction, his office contacted me. It was time for my annual check-up. Perfect.
My right eye failed every part of the vision test. Distance vision. Up-close vision. Peripheral vision. Yikes! Maybe I didn’t have poison ivy after all. Maybe I had a cataract. Or glaucoma. Or macular degeneration. Or retinopathy. Maybe I’d never be able to drive again or swim underwater with my eyes open or watch TV or read or write or use my cell phone.
Wrong on all counts, thank goodness. The doctor took one look at my eye and diagnosed not poison ivy but a stye, which is simply a bump caused by an infected sebaceous gland on the eyelid. Sure, it was red and swollen and ugly and itchy. Scary, in fact. But no big deal, he assured me. He gave me a prescription for an ointment to use four times a day and told me to hold a warm compress on the eyelid whenever possible. “It should be way better in a couple of weeks,” he said. “Come see me then.”
Only it wasn’t. Two weeks later, the stye was still red and ugly and itchy. It had swollen to the size of a pencil eraser. A brand-new pencil eraser. The doctor took one look and it and said we’d need to lance and drain it.
“Right now?” I asked.
“Right now,” he answered. Suffice it to say that, though the procedure was easier than natural childbirth, it was no walk in the park. It involved me holding very still and softly screaming through clenched teeth while my eyelid was numbed with one needle and drained with another needle. “It was full of gunk,” Doc told me. “You should be back to normal very soon.”
Fingers crossed that he’s right.
(June 13, 2026)