The Saga of the Red Weals

Six days before my wedding, I woke up with some strange red marks under my eyes. Here’s my diary of the next few days…

 

Well, there’s just six days to go until the wedding folks, and guess what I got this week? Yes, that’s right, I got me some RED WEALS. Aaargh! You remember my red weals, don’t you? They were the huge, ugly ass red marks that appeared underneath my eyes last year… I finally concluded that they were being caused by my beloved Touche Eclat concealer, so I stopped using it and the weals went away. Until now.

This week, you see, the red weals have come back, and they’re back with a bit of a twist, the twist being that they’re now appearing both underneath and above my eyes. More specifically, two eyes have red weals above them, one eye also has an attractive, puffed-up red weal underneath it, too. With less than a week left until my wedding, this is obviously really handy, isn’t it?

I’m freaking out a bit here, to be honest. And in answer to the questions I just know you all will be asking: no, I have not been using any different products recently. No, I have not changed my skincare routine. Yes, it does seem like I must be allergic to something, why yes it does! BUT WHAT? For the love of God, what is making my eyes go all red like this, and, more importantly, HOW DO I STOP IT?!

Well, first things first: I am not wearing any makeup. I’m a complete makeup free zone here, and this means that I also won’t really be going out of the house much this week because oh my God, I look scary without makeup. The weals must away, though, and as I don’t have time to try and eliminate things that could be causing them one at a time, I’m just going to have to eliminate everything, all at once. This completely sucks, as you can imagine. I mean, I’m sitting here looking like someone punched me hard in the face, and then I sat up all night crying over it, and trust me, this is SO not the look I was planning on having for the wedding.

Gah. Gah, gah and thrice gah. And also: I wonder what will go wrong on the other five days?

 

Five Days to Go…

OK, so we have antihistamine cream. We have haemorrhoid cream. We have industrial strength intensive cream for very dry skin. We have a little miniature hairdryer which, OK, has nothing at all to do with the RED WEALS, but which was only £5 in Boots, how about that? (Oh, and by “we” I mean “I”, by the way. I seem to be referring to myself in the third person, I have no idea why. Sorry.) We still have the red weals at this stage, but PLEASE GOD LET ONE OF THESE CREAMS WORK and I will… I dunno, give money to the poor? Would that do you? (Wait a minute, I AM the poor. Does that mean I get to give money to myself?) Give me something to work with here, God… if you want my soul or something, now would be a good time to ask, you know? Because I would totally sell my soul in return for the eyes I had last week, pre-weals. Totally.

Yeah, I’m pretty stressed here for sure. Weally stressed, you could say, fnar, fnar. (God, I crack myself up, sometimes. :makesjokestotryandhidethefactthatsheisSCARED:) And actually, I don’t feel even slightly stressed about the wedding – just about the red weals. GOD.

Anyway. This morning I got up and went to the shops to buy my various potions and it was so warm and sunny I had to open the sunroof on the car, and…

(brief pause while I go outside and close the sunroof again)

… it honestly felt like summer. (Bear in mind here that this is Scotland, so “mildly warm” is actually about as good as summer gets). It’s lovely. It was like this on Saturday too, and you know what that means? Why, that means that there is NO WAY IN HELL that it will be this nice on Saturday. I don’t care though. Just as long as I get to have a weal-free wedding…

 

Four Days to Go: She’s Not Got Bette Davis Eyes

Because I know you’ve all been up all night worrying about the status of my RED WEALS (and let me tell you, I certainly have) I’m taking a break from my hectic schedule of FREAKING THE HELL OUT to update you. You will thank me for this one day when you, too, wake up five days from your wedding with eyes like a crack whore, trust me.

(Also: did you know that the top four results on Google for “red weals around eyes” are for this very blog? And that people search using that term every single day in life? People who do that – I’m so sorry that this blog has been unable to give you the help you need on the red weals issue. To be honest, it wasn’t much help to me either when I Googled “red weals around eyes”. Gah. After this week’s entries I fully expect to get me some more weal-related dominance on Google, which just goes to show that my life has not been wasted after all. Phew.*)

Anyway, suffice to say that, as per this entry’s title, I don’t have Bette Davis eyes this morning. No, I still got me the red, ugly eyes of the WEALS. They’re not quite as crack-whore-ish as they were yesterday, however, which tells me that one of the many potions I used on them yesterday is working. The question: which one is it? We may never know. The general consensus today, however, seems to be that this is, indeed, a stress-related thing, so I’m now trying to remain as calm and relaxed as possible – which actually isn’t all that easy when you have red weal eyes four days before your wedding, and you wake up to find that your dog has been violently sick all over his bed…

Also, I have been having fairly stressful wedding-related nightmares every morning for about a week now, and yes, I know it’s really boring when people insist on relating their dreams in tedious detail to you (“And then the chair turned into an elephant! And the elephant turned into Michael Jackson! And he ate me!”), but I’m going to do it anyway, albeit in the lazy blogger’s favourite format: the bulleted list. Here they are.

Wedding-related dreams I have had this week:

1. The morning of the wedding. Terry announces that as a “surprise” he has bought us tickets to see The Eagles in Glasgow, that very morning. We will travel to Glasgow (1 hour), see the band, travel back, then get married. Because that wouldn’t be stressful AT ALL.
2. The morning of the wedding. My parents arrive in a helicopter and announce that they’re taking me to visit Loch Lomond before the ceremony. Again: totally not stressful to try and do something like that right before the wedding, although, in their defense, they did have a helicopter.
3. The first day of the honeymoon. We arrive at our villa (which now a poky little one-bedroom apartment – surprise!) and suddenly remember that we invited every single last member of both our families to join us on honeymoon. And they did. Doh!
4. Continuation of the dream above. Terry and I want to go out for a nice, romantic meal on honeymoon. My dad won’t let us because he has cooked everyone steak pie and mashed potato. “No need to eat out AT ALL on this honeymoon when we can have steak pie here in the apartment every night!” says my dad. Quite.
5. On honeymoon. Terry dives into the shallow end of the swimming pool. Terry breaks his neck. The End.

I wonder what tonight will bring? Anyway, now I must go and eat something, then relax. Terry, meanwhile, is currently packing his suitcase, so either he’s getting ready for the honeymoon, or he’s planning to leave me. At this point I have no idea which it is…

* I also rank pretty highly for the search term “pee in the woods”. I’m all about the over-achieving, me.

 

Two Days to Go: Traveling Light

Despite the title of this entry, anyone who seen the recent photo I posted of my shoes will probably have guessed that I’m not really much of a one for travelling light. Oh hell no. In fact, I’ve just spent almost the entire day packing for my honeymoon, and trust me, it has not gone well. So far I’ve packed, unpacked and repacked several times, but my case STILL won’t close properly and I’ve only been able to squeeze in five pairs of shoes – and two of those don’t even count because they’re flip-flops and tennis shoes. And OK, I’ll wear one of the pairs I intended to take with me to travel in, so that’s just six pairs of shoes, but even so – SIX . PAIRS. OF. SHOES. That sucks. And also? Blows.

It’s totally freaking me out. I emailed my mum in a panic, and she was all, “you don’t need lots of pairs of shoes,” but the thing is, I totally DO need lots of pairs of shoes. Aaargh!

In better news, the red weals have totally disappeared now, so you’re looking at a 100% weal-free zone, kids. (Well, you would be if you were actually looking at me. You know what I mean.) I’m also so super-organised that I’ve even remembered to renew my library books online because we’ll be away when they’re due back, GO ME! And I also managed yet another quick trip to the shops to see if That Dress in Asda was available in my size yet. (It wasn’t, so I bought shoes instead, HOW WILL I GET THEM IN MY CASE?)

So. Things are moving along nicely. Terry’s best man and brother, John, arrived today from Birmingham; his other brother will be arriving from Athens tomorrow, and my best friend is travelling up from the south of England tomorrow, too. It’s really humbling to think of all of these people travelling all that way just because of us. I mean – wow. We totally don’t deserve that. Tomorrow the men’s suits have to be picked up, and I’m having my nails done (which I’m not looking forward to because it will involve lots of that inane beautician smalltalk I’m so bad at)… then we’re good to go.

One thing, though. Well, two things, actually:

Thing One

Tomorrow Rubin is being taken to the place he knows as ‘Las Vegas’ and we know as “the dog kennels up the road”. Now, he has been there before, so I know they’ll look after him, and he’ll only be there for two nights before my parents take him to their house for the rest of the fortnight we’re away, but I feel terrible. So, so terrible. I mean, yes, it’s only for two nights, but the thing is, he won’t know that. He will think he’s been totally abandoned, and that we’re never coming back for him, and all day he’s been breaking my heart with his big, mournful eyes. Mind you, he did pee on the washing machine while I was out buying my shoes, so moving on…

Thing Two

I am terrified of flying, and I don’t mean I’m just a little bit scared of flying here, I mean “one time the cabin crew almost had to sedate me to get me to calm down”. It’s like, Mr T-league fear of flying. For the past few weeks I’ve been able to distract myself from the all-consuming fear with work and wedding planning, but now that I actually come to pack my case? I am crapping myself. How will I get on the plane? What if it crashes? And, you know, there really hasn’t been a big plane crash for ages now, which means there MUST be one due soon, no? Terrified. And things like this don’t help:

Must think positive, must think positive, must think positive…