I was pretty optimistic earlier this year when the doctor suggested that my continuing problems had to do with dehydration. That explained why I would sometimes get a scratched cornea even when I was pretty sure my eye hadn't been hit or even brushed.
So I upped the water as directed, started gobbling fish oil pills like M&Ms, and dropping droplets of artificial tears in my eyes all day and during breaks in training. When I accidentally got kicked ("heeled" to be specific) in my eye shortly after the new treatment approach, I shook it off as just a little irony: sure, the main problem is dehydration. But I'm still going to have to be ready to take my knocks--even in the eye.
But that last eye poke at GB Seattle in late March really put me over the edge. I stopped training and sat on the sidelines talking with Mike and trying not to look up as I waited for my eye to click back into focus. Things got worse over the course of the evening and Friday morning, I couldn't see and the pain was splitting. Sitting under the bright lights of the office and staring at a computer screen was out of the question.
I was better by late Friday evening, and through the weekend. I didn't train that Monday, partly to give my eye more rest and partly to save myself for Cindy on Wednesday. Wednesday came and though there were a few times when I'd feel contact, like when I got armbarred from the mount and felt the leg pressed across the top of my face, I managed to roll the whole evening and went home very glad for the training. I'd been feeling more than a little misanthropic given some family stuff ("extended" family, I should add), and that evening at Demon seemed to really do the trick.
I woke up Thursday with my eye on fire. As bad as it was, I know the drill by this time. Call in, unleash the co-codamol, turn out the lights, cover your eyes. And wait.
By Thursday night I was feeling better. Made it into work Friday a little hazy, but good enough to go.
In retrospect, I was probably fading all day. I was ducking into the vault (the office used to be a bank; the library is in one of the vaults) to escape the lights ever ten minutes or so. I'd write in the dark, and then slip back to my computer and quickly type up whatever I'd hand-written in the vault.
By about 2 p.m., I was losing it fast. I had a couple of hours to burn, so I was luckily scheduled to leave at about 3:15 p.m. I thought about having Rebecca come pick me up. But my eye felt like that scene in La chein andalu where they drag that razor across the woman's eye right after showing that image of the cloud slicing through a full moon. I had to get out of there.
Driving home was one of the stupidiest things I've done since my irresponsible 20s back in Arizona. I had one hand over my eye, tears streaming down my face as I'm closing the other eye for a few seconds at a time when on familiar streets just to keep the razor feeling from shooting through my head.
Fortunately I made it home in one piece (hell, fortunately I only live 15-20 minutes from the office!).
It was a bad day, and my eye felt as bad as it ever had been. I ended up missing work on Monday and it wasn't until relatively late in the day before I could open my eyes without pain.
So I'm climbing on the shelf. I can't afford to keep missing work, and I can't keep taking these shots to my eye. The only thing that makes sense is that I just never gave it enough time to heal in the first place. When I went back to the doctor the first time after a week, the doc told me that it looked as if it had healed up. I took that as an "all clear" to resume training. Might have been my bad on that one.
I'm giving myself a month. A month where I don't have to worry about missing work, a month where I can let my eye heal, relubricate, whatever the hell it needs to do in order to get better. A month to make more than a few glasses of lemonade out of the current basket of C. x limon that have been delivered to my doorstep.
My goal is to be back on the mat, non-contact, by the first week of May, and doing contact work by mid-month. I've got the rest of my life to get to where I want to in jiu jitsu (a third degree black belt by the time I die). Losing a month or so here or there is little more than a speed bump.
It does bug me that I'm not able to continue working with Cindy as she prepares for Abu Dhabi. One of the things I'd hoped would happen when I started training was that I'd get to play the role of training/sparring partner for the younger and/or better teammates who were stepping up to face the toughest competition in the sport. It's fun, and for me it's even a little flattering that more advanced teammates think of me as a serious student of the art and worth making a (small) part of their preparation.
So it sucks that this first great opportunity is shot. That, more than anything else, bugs me about climbing on the shelf for a few weeks. But in the end, it's a move I've got to do until I've got some sense that the mean season of the eye is over.
