My Eye

Part One - Monday

My right contact was bothering me, but I was holding the baby and wasn't giving her up.  

Big mistake. 

By the time I convinced myself to deal with the offending object,  the damage was done. There was (and is) an ouchie on my eyeball.

Or maybe it's on my inner eye lid.  It doesn't really matter.  It's there and I can't ignore it.  

More than just the worry that it will never go away, there's the whole drainage thing. The eye is tearing at an alarming rate.  I have a kiddie pool of eye drool sitting on my face.   Every once in a while it overflows, and I have to dab with a tissue.  Sometimes the tissue rushes to my nose, sometimes to my cheek,  but always the tissue is rushing ..... somewhere. 

Part Two - Tuesday 

Closing my eye felt good, but it's not a great idea to have closed eyes while traveling through airports. Seeking relief, I was asleep, with my eyes closed, under a blanket next to TBG, a little more than an hour after we landed. 

I woke up to flowers from my San Francisco family

and a weepy eyeball.  

We were hungry so I cooked a fritatta while wiping the weeps and washing my hands (again and again) before dealing with the food. 

The whole situation was getting old. 

My annual physical is tomorrow; knowing that I'll be seeing my wise and patient physician first thing in the morning kept me calm, but the irritation and the dripping were driving me mad.

Then I smoked a joint. I felt better in five minutes.  

I have my medical marijuana license, it's legal in Arizona, and it replaced my daily Advil and aspirin cocktail a decade ago, while I was healing from the shooting.  No one wants to take 2 Advil every 6 hours for 10 years, after all. As the naturopath says whenever he renews my license, your liver thanks you.

I always thought the effects had more to do with disrupting the pain signals than physically altering my body.  But tonight, I can state with confidence that there are definitely beneficial physical consequences.  

The irritation is subsiding.  It's not gone, but there is progress.  Even better, the dripping has stopped. I haven't stopped to wipe since I began composing this post. 

Many strains of marijuana make you thirsty. That same drying effect seems to extend to the eyes.  It's kind of obvious once I thought about it. I don't believe that any kind of magical thinking could have affected my tear ducts.  Believe me, if wishful thinking made it stop, I wouldn't be writing this post. 

The whole thing is still annoying and vaguely terrifying, but, without the waterworks, it's manageable.  Imagine research identifying what to use for what symptoms, something organic, not chemically created and compressed into a pill. 

It really is medicine.  So what if brings a little joy along the way?