Christopher's Choice

If I were a superhero I would very probably be a sinister Tim Burton-esque type character. I would call myself something like Grosslyunfortunateboy, for example. In the past year I have suffered from a broken jaw, vocal chord paralysis, strydor and a blocked salivary gland. The latter, if you recall, required "milking".

*shudders*

On Saturday I went to a pub in my old stomping ground, West Hampstead, to watch the FA Cup Final with Lynda, Alison, Robbie and Richard. Actually I did less "watching football" and much more "getting in the way of the big TV screen", much to the irritation of the local punters.

At one point during our conversation, Robbie (who is going to be a father in two weeks time) starts to look strangely at my right eye. "Do you have a sty?"

"No!" I tell him, and, irritated, touch the "offending" eyelid with my finger.

What I find is not a sty. I've had many a sty before and they are not like what I found this time - hard and not painful. A lump, basically.

Great. Cancer.

I start to wonder if I'm going to have to have my eyelid removed. Will I have to wear an eyepatch, Darryl Hannah / Kill Bill style? It has not escaped me that whenever faced with a crisis that will affect my appearance (you may laugh, but if you are a regular here you will know joke I most certainly do not) my first thought is, "But will boys at DTPM want to kiss me?"

(I can reliably inform you that in the instance of a wired-up broken jaw, the answer to this particular question is, "no.")

This morning I went to my doctor. My doctor is, quite simply, the best freaking doctor in the entire northern hemisphere, nay, the world. I know this, because by lightly touching my eyelid for a fraction of a second he knew that the lump was not malignant but actually a simple Meibomian Cyst.

Amazing.

My doctor told me that I have two options. The first is that I rub the cyst with a warm flannel every night, for five minutes before I go to bed for the next month. He clearly doesn't know me very well. If he did he would have understood why I could barely suppress my mirth for, oh, about ten minutes.

The second option is that I have surgery to remove it. "Most people don't elect for this option, because it's not a very nice procedure."

Oooh! Surgical gross out! I lean forward and excitedly, and slightly conspiratorially, whisper, "Why? What do they do?"

"Well," he explains, using that incredibly patronizing I'm a medical professional and thus very clever - I have your eyelid life in my hands tone. "It's not a general anesthetic procedure. You receive a local anesthetic and you can see everything they do to you. Or at least you can see the surgical implements coming towards your eye. Most patients who have a Meibomian Cyst elect for the non-surgical option."

I think it over, but it doesn't take long to come to a conclusion. DTPM plus Meibomian Cysts. Hmmm.

No prizes for guessing what I opted for.