CHAPTER 1: THE EXTENDED BAN

AKA THE EYE WORM INCIDENT

This was Patient Zero. The first recorded case. The moment Doc realized that untreated Google exposure would become the true disease vector in my life. Everything after—eye worms, toenail suffocation, jewelry digestion, spectral chickens—was merely the natural escalation.

CHAPTER 1: THE EYE WORM INCIDENT

The eye twitch started small. Just a little spasm in my left eyelid, annoying and insistent, like a tiny Morse code message from inside my skull. I’d been tired, stressed, overextended. On its own, it was nothing. But nothing in my life ever stays “on its own” for long.

Two weeks earlier, in a rainstorm, I’d stopped at a pizza place I’d never been to before, on my way home from getting puppy Shamrock his special kibble. I opened my car door and heard the faintest little:

“Meeep.”

Under the fuel tank, soaked and shivering, was a tiny grey-and-white kitten—maybe five weeks old, all eyes and bones and terror. I held out my hands. She jumped right into them.

I carried her into the pizza place and asked if she belonged to anyone. The staff didn’t even hesitate.

“Yeah,” one of them said. “You. We’ve been trying for days to catch her. We saw someone throw her out of a moving car.”

And that was that. She was mine. I named her Squirt because she was so impossibly small.

I took her home, quarantined her from the others, and did all the right things… technically. But she was a baby, and I was me, so there was also a lot of: petting, cuddling, face-kissing, not-always-perfect handwashing.

At some point during those two weeks, she did what kittens do: licked her butt, then climbed up my chest, and lovingly licked my eyelid. At the time, I laughed. A little gross, but whatever—she was tiny and perfect and mine.

Then, later, the eye twitch started.

Connecting the Terrible Dots

Here is where things went sideways. I knew—because I’d lived through life and ferrets—that stray babies almost always have worms. Squirt hadn’t been diagnosed yet, but in my head that was already a given.

So when my eyelid started twitching, and I eventually (against all better judgment) asked the internet…

And the internet said:

“Yes, some parasites can migrate to the eyes.”

…my brain did the rest.

I didn’t just remember the kitten lick. I reconstructed it.

Tongue → butt → egg → tongue → my eyelid → rubbing my eye afterward → worm eggs in my eye socket → twitching → hatching → larvae chewing on my optic nerve.

It didn’t feel like a theory. It felt like a recovered memory of my own doom.

So by the time I made an appointment with Doc, I wasn’t going there to ask if I had eye worms. In my mind, I already did. I was going there for step one of treatment.

Mission: Data Acquisition

When I walked into the exam room with Squirt, my left eye was twitching like it was trying to send an SOS. Doc came in, expecting vaccinations for a stray kitten. I handed Squirt to him and went straight into it.

Me: “You have to find out what kind of worms she has because they’re in my eye now and I need to tell the ER doctor so they can give me the right meds before I lose my eye.”

No preamble. No warm-up. Just that.

Doc stared at me. Then at Squirt. Then slowly around the room, as if he fully expected Ashton Kutcher to step out of a cabinet with a camera crew.

Doc: “…am I being punked?”

His temple vein started doing that slow, ominous throbbing thing. I launched into my reasoning—timeline, symptoms, kitten butt, eyelid incident, eye twitch, parasite migration, ER plan. The whole catastrophic chain.

Mid-rant, he gently handed Squirt to the tech, walked up to me, wrapped his arms around my shoulders, and said:

“Shhhhh…”

Like I was a spooked horse. I kept talking anyway, words muffled into his scrub top.

Me: “No, you don’t get it, they’re in there and if I don’t—”

Doc: “Shhhhh.”

Me: “—get to the ER before they eat through—”

Doc: “Shhhhhhh.”

He didn’t argue yet. He didn’t correct me. He just grounded me with a hug like he was hitting an emotional reset button.

Enter Justin

Here’s the thing about Justin: he is good at staying calm on the outside. When I spiral, he becomes the quiet, steady one. He doesn’t show his own fear because he doesn’t want to add kindling to my fire. So while I was going full “parasite thriller” internally, he was trying very hard to be the rational anchor.

But he has a line. And I was about to go to a human ER insisting on kitten-butt-derived ocular worms. That crossed it.

So he arrived at Doc’s office a little later, having held it together for as long as he could. And the moment he stepped inside that exam room—the moment he saw Doc—he finally let it out. Doc = safe place to fall apart. He came in wired, eyes wide.

Justin: “Is it true? Eye worms?!”

Doc closed his eyes like a man who had seen too much.

Doc: “What did I say about the internet?”

Justin: “…no internet for her?”

Doc: “No internet for her.”

Justin: “But does she have an eye worm?”

There was a long pause where you could almost see Doc’s remaining will to live slide sideways out of his body.

Doc: “No internet for anyone in your family.”

Justin opened his mouth to protest. Doc stepped forward and hugged him too.

Doc: “Shhhhh.”

The vet tech stood in the corner holding tiny Squirt like she was the only sane one in the room.

Reality, Unfortunately Less Dramatic

Once he’d hugged the panic out of both of us, Doc finally did the boring thing: medicine.

He examined Squirt. Explained calmly: Yes, kittens often have worms. No, nothing about this situation indicated eye migration. My eye twitch was almost certainly from stress and exhaustion. I did not, in fact, have my eyeball eaten from the inside out. And no ER visit was needed.

He didn’t make fun of me. He didn’t roll his eyes (out loud). He just said, with that mix of patience and exasperation he saves for us:

“You don’t have worms in your eye. You got scared, you cared too much, and the internet filled in the rest.”

He was right. I hadn’t believed the facts. I’d believed the story I built around them.

The kitten. The rescue. The guilt. The responsibility. The twitch. The what-ifs. And then the internet, whispering, “Yes, it could be this horrible thing.”

The Expanded Ban

As we were getting ready to leave, Doc looked at me, then at Justin.

Doc: “No more Googling symptoms. For either of you.”

We nodded.

Doc: “I mean it. No internet for you.”

We nodded again. We absolutely did not listen.

But that was the day the rule became official FOR BOTH OF US:

No Internet For You.

And it all started with one tiny kitten, one guilty eyelid kiss, one twitching eye, and one very patient vet holding two grown adults like panicked livestock and saying:

“Shhhhh.”