Maybe you’ve kept up with my tear duct saga, maybe not. So here’s a brief recap:

With increasing frequency (once every few years, now at least once a year), my eye has gotten very watery/has had some gunky discharge, indicating that my tear duct is blocked. So I’ve tried medicated eye drops and antibiotics and getting it probed and ignoring it, and none of it has been helpful in the long run. Prior to my last appointment, I would have said that my duct gets blocked, but the truth probably is that my duct has been fairly blocked for a long time, and what I’m seeing is stuff building up in there.

I know, it sounds counterintuitive. If your tear duct isn’t working, shouldn’t you have dry eyes? Nope! Think of it kind of like a bathtub with a wonky drain. I produce tears just fine, but nothing drains, and the longer stuff sits in that duct, the more gross it gets, until eventually it just backs up the pipe and comes back out at what we’d largely refer to as the tear duct. (The wonky part of the plumbing is my lachrymal duct, down towards the nose/cheekbone area.)

When it was a duct problem every once in a while, it was one thing. But the increasing frequency of the problem has been an irritation, and when my eye started watering in January this year, nothing has really taken care of it – so it’s clearly time to go nuclear on it.

Enter: Surgery

So in a couple of weeks, they’re going to take the little tubes at the corners of my eyes and re-route that plumbing. Instead of going down to that useless lachrymal duct, they’re going to punch a small hole in the side of my nose and make the tears empty through my nose. It’s not as weird as it sounds – tears normally empty out into the back of your throat after going through your lachrymal duct. They’re just re-routing it so that the tears skip the lachrymal duct and go to the back of my throat via my nose a bit sooner.

All in all, it should be a pretty easy surgery. A little obnoxious, in that, I can’t blow my nose for two weeks afterwards, but not overly painful, and to have the problem taken care of permanently sounds great at this point.

I miss wearing makeup. There’s no point to wearing makeup when there’s a good chance my right eye is going to cry it all off within a couple hours anyway.

For the record, the title of this post is inspired by this Jonathan Coulton song. Enjoy.