Somewhere in the vast bureaucracy of the universe, a department must exist whose sole focus is fucking around with humans.
And what exactly would we call this department? Human Fuckery? Human Equilibration? Homeo Stasis? Human Fuckery, yes, that one sits quite comfortably.
I imagine a sprawling office filled with cubicles, of course, washed out in anemic fluorescent light, furnished with uncomfortable ergonomic chairs, and populated by overworked employees assigned massive portfolios of unsuspecting humans. Mostly, they handle the boring, the inane, the typical stupid human tricks. Flat tires, kidney stones, layoffs, and food poisoning. The occasional stubbed toes, papercuts, and drinking things “the wrong way.”
But every once in a while, a file makes its way to an unsuspecting employee’s desk, and handling it requires a bit more creativity and nuance. Apparently, yours truly has just such a file. I’m pretty sure I’m quite well-known around the old Office of Human Fuckery by now. Maybe even a little famous. Not real fame, though, famous like how a local news weatherperson is famous.
“Wait a minute, Lesher? Thee Lesher? You’re not shitting me, are you?”
“Nope.”
A big sigh, eyes closed and head shaking, up comes my file.
“Fuck me. Didn’t we already give this guy Ménière’s Disease?”
“Yep.”
“And the vestibular damage?”
“Guess that was part of the Ménière’s package.”
“Hearing loss?”
“Also the Ménière’s, and yes, mostly the right ear.”
Scrolling. Scrolling.
“And I’m seeing two strokes.”
“Correct.”
“Two? Wow, someone was working for a promotion.”
“Technically one was a TIA.”
“Oh. Well, that’s different.”
More scrolling.
“And the other one?”
“Ischemic. Vertebral artery dissection, I believe.”
“Jesus.”
Sitting back in his chair, he ponders his department’s ballooning workload.
“I don’t know. Hasn’t this guy had enough?”
And for a while, an air of agreement wafted through the cube farm like a fart in a crowded elevator. And it held.
Until Friday, July 24, 2026.
It was early evening. My wife and I were winding down the week. Couch time, some Nordic crime show. I’d had a couple of cocktails (gin gimlets, my favorite). Nothing particularly interesting was happening, which is exactly how I prefer my Friday evenings. I went upstairs to take a shower.
Let’s assume that I made the bath-to-shower transition sometime around my 9th birthday. This would mean I’ve taken somewhere around 16,000 showers in my life. Give or take. Of course I had no reason to believe this particular shower would be noteworthy. After all, I was alone.
Somewhere, a notification pops up on a screen.
“What’s Lesher doing again?”
“This report says he’s—hold on a second—says he’s taking a, yeah, says he’s taking a shower. Here, take a look.”
“Ugh. The utter mundanity of human existence. Seriously, we should just leave him alone.”
“Absolutely. That is a perfectly valid response. A respectful response. I was thinking that, too.”
Uncomfortable silence threatens threatens to outstay its welcome.
“Although…”
“Wait. What are you saying?”
“This here also says that he’s wearing something called a hard scleral contact lens. For the cornea transplant that we made sure went just well enough, remember?”
“Yeah, I remember. He needs the lens to see out of that eye. Guess the transplant left him with a pretty nasty astigmatism. Kudos to us. Anyway, so what?”
“It’s just that this hard plastic thing is sitting on top of his transplanted cornea. The one he got about 10 years ago that we refused to fuck with because you said the operation did the job?”
Buffering. Buffering.
“And why exactly are you telling me all this now?”
“I don’t know, just seems like an unusually specific combination of circumstances that we may never see again. I don’t want you to regret it.”
“Holy hell, man, we’ve been over this. Didn’t we agree? He’s had enough.”
“Of course, yeah, definitely.”
It could have ended here. I have had what some would quantify as my fair share of bullshit visited upon me by the universe. There was no reason to pile on, right? Just leave it alone. But the file was already open.
“What’s he doing now?”
“Seems like he’s singing along to Gerry Rafferty, Right Down the Line, fucking love that song. Anyway, he’s oblivious, just washing his face. Seems happy, actually.”
“Don’t.”
“What? What did I do? I’m not doing anything.”
“Good. Let’s keep it that way. OK?”
“Although his thumb is getting awfully close to his left eye.”
“Goddammit. Fine.”
What happened next took less than a second. A life changed in milliseconds.
While I was washing my face and head, my thumb found my left eye. Normally, this would have produced a momentary burst of pain, some stars, a tirade of profanity, and perhaps a few minutes of watery-eyed self-pity. This was not normal.
Hold on, it gets a little gross from here.
My thumb had impacted the hard scleral lens that was covering my transplanted cornea with just the right combination of force, angle, and spectacularly shitty luck to rupture my eyeball.
More specifically, the impact had torn the corneal graft loose from my eye. Graft dehiscence being the sexier term. It also caused something called vitreous prolapse—where the jelly-like substance inside the eye moves into the front part of the eye—and ejected the crystalline lens, the actual lens lens from inside my eyeball.
I stood, naked on the bathroom rug, dripping wet, soap bubbles still on my head. I grabbed the edge of the sink, looked at myself in the mirror, and knew. I took a breath and called downstairs to my wife.
“I don’t want you to panic, but I think we need to go to the emergency room.”
This shower ended with a trip to the ER, an overnight stay in the world’s least comfortable bed crammed into a storage closet, and emergency surgery the next morning. Followed in five days by another surgery to repair one of the 14 stitches responsible for holding my cornea in place and sealing my now-leaky eyeball. Sorry, open globe injury. They call it a globe. Because I guess leaky eyeball doesn’t have the same medical ring.
All because I took a damn shower. If someone had told me when I was a kid that I was going to have a 1:16,000 chance of poking my own damn eyeball out, would I have stopped taking showers? Exactly.
There are moments in life when we become acutely aware of the distance between everything is fine and everything is most definitely not fine. And it is considerably shorter than you’d think.
I’d estimate it’s about the length of my thumb.
Back at the Department of Human Fuckery, everyone is gathered around a monitor screen.
“What the everloving fuck? Did he seriously just rupture his own eyeball? With his thumb?”
“Yes and yes.”
“While he was in the shower?”
“Again, yes.”
“And the lens inside his eye…the actual goddamn lens, just popped out?”
“Spit out like a watermelon seed. Gone.”
“Gone where, exactly?”
“We’re not really sure. There were a lot of bubbles. The drain, maybe?”
An exchange of side-eye. A beat of silence.
“Noice. Ahem…OK. Seriously, though. We really should leave this damn guy alone, right? Yeah. Definitely…for now.”
