Turns Out I'm a Little Bent

A visit to the eye doctor had me laughing! I was there for yet another type of eye test. This is the fourth or fifth visit. I've lost track, the doctor just can't figure out what is wrong with my eye. The lovely technician looking at photos of the veins in my eyes says,

"Yah you are a little bent! Those are some wicked curly veins you've got."

Not the first time I've heard about my bent veins, others have referred to my veins as curly and unruly. These unruly veins are in both my eyes and my arms.

I'm a phlebotomist's nightmare. The record is 3 different nurses and two phlebotomists at the doctor's office poking me 10 different times trying to tap a vein. They ultimately sent me away and had me go to the local hospital lab.

This bent-curly business got me thinking. Is it a genetic thing? I have very curly hair coming down my Irish side. Did my DNA just say,

"Hey let's get bendy with it?"

Seriously even the roots of my teeth curl at the end! My teeth curl away from the x-ray camera so this unruly issue went undetected until a hellish month of failed root channels. The dentist, like the eye doctor, just couldn't figure out what was wrong. The dentist finally decided to do an intentional re-implant of my troublesome tooth. He pulled the tooth to do the root channel from the bottom and intended on re-implanting it. He pulled it and exclaimed,

"I'll be damned. This is remarkable!"

He ran out of the room waving my tooth in the air. He took my tooth across the hall to show his colleague. Neither of them had ever seen a curly tooth before. I became a poster girl in the office. Every time I went in for a cleaning or another tooth issue he would proudly exclaim,

"This is the one with the intentional re-implant, our curly toothed patient!!" 

Oh NO, I just had a vision of the eye doctor plucking my eye out and running around the office with it! 

Besides the curly veins and teeth, there is the hair.

I was lucky enough to visit the ancestral isle of Ireland a couple of decades ago. It was such a comfort to see people who looked like me. Everywhere I went people who were freckled, sturdy, and had very curly hair. All this unruly hair was the rule in the parts of Ireland I visited.

Even more decades ago, in high school I got snarky with the choreographer of our musical "South Pacific". He wanted us faux Polynesian dancers to do a back bend swooping our hair on the floor. Me and my curly pixie cut did just that, leaned way back and nearly touched my head to the floor. He was horrified by how bendy I was.

He screamed, "I meant the girls with real hair, not that mess on your head!"

I guess it's true, the evidence supports the statement, I'm a little bent. My eyes and arms have curly veins. My teeth are crooked but in a remarkable way. I have extraordinary flexibility, aka I'm bendy. And to crown the whole theme, my hair is bent and unruly.

As I was leaving the eye doctors still without an answer to what is wrong with my eye, the lovely technician called out to me, "I love your curls by the way. They are bent just right!" Even behind the mask you could feel her giant smile. She was just as disappointed that I still have no answer for my medical mystery. And I'm very happy the eye doctor did not pluck my eye out and run around with it!