Teacher Diaries: My Personal Area
(One of my most favourite Natalie Dee comics)
This week was unfortunately miserable to say the least... and all because of something that I am still in denial about... I somehow caught conjunctivitis at work. Well, I guess the use of "somehow" would indicate that I didn't know how I got it, when the truth of the matter is that I know exactly how it happened.
On Friday last week, I showed up to work completely fine but after my morning recess duty in the kindergarten yard at my school, I returned into the building and used the washroom to wash my hands when I was alarmed by my reflection in the mirror: my left eye was super red. By lunchtime, the condition had worsened with my eye looking bloodshot, so I headed straight to the drugstore and picked up some over the counter antibiotic eye drops. It turns out, there was a case of pink eye in the kindergarten classes, and they had yet to disinfect any of the surfaces in the area that I happened to be in on Friday morning, so with my luck, I caught it. In over 27 years, not once have I ever contracted pink eye and the fact that I did this past week is embarrassing to say the least. After a visit to my family doctor, all of my eye makeup had to be thrown out, replaced, and I also had to take a sick day from work (doctor's orders).
The comic above which I have used before to express my sentiments about personal space describes exactly how I feel whenever I am surrounded by the cute, but very germ-ridden, children in kindergarten. It brings me back to my first few years teaching during teacher's college and in Hong Kong when I once had bronchitis 4 times in a span of less than a year. Luckily, I am past the bronchitis phase and onto much more "fun" things such as viral infections in the eye area. The teachers who have the pleasure of teaching those little buggers are officially my heroes, that's for sure!
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