What can "eye" do..........

My thoughts flow from what's happening inside me (medically speaking) to how what is happening to me is affecting other people (emotionally speaking). Again I make reference to OLG (see previous blog),  Aquinas High School (St. Thomas Aquinas that is) and the Negrete Dynasty in Berdoo for molding me into the person that I am. "Eye" never was much of an athlete growing up and I always attributed that to the loss of my left eye at the tender age of 18 months. Never having had the ability to see out of both eyes forced me to strengthen my right eye while trying to protect it as the last survivor. Having limited movement in the glass eye drew attention (at times unwarranted and definitely, unwanted) and my response was to deflect it with humor - sarcastic at times, witty at others and sometimes downright hilarious. Forty-eight years later I have honed my deflective wise-ass cracking craft so that most do not notice the lack of movement in my glass eye.

The set-up here is really just to relate how I made some money in grammer and high school - I took my eye out. Yes, catholic humor has its merits! I would conspire with friends to identify new victims/students who were not aware of my gift of sight. We would broker a deal on the unlikely premise that "Gary can take his eye out, wanna see?".  Consideration  (money, pesos, a goat.....) was exchanged and the deal would go down when the unsuspecting nun was not looking. I would calmly pinch the glass eye out out of its socket, pop it into my mouth (how else would I clean it?) effectively completing the deal. 

Again, I would use the point of my unwanted attention (the wandering eye) to deflect attention away from ....... the wandering eye - brilliant! At least I thought so. This technique helped me to overcome how I would feel when I was looking at someone; but my body, my head and more importantly my eyes were not angled just right.  My good right eye was looking at them; but that damned glass eye had a mind of its own and was determined to "look" somewhere else (usually just over their shoulder causing them to look over their shoulder). 

Anyway, "eye" want to be the person who I am. I want to keep being the best of who I am regardless of what is growing inside me and what will need to be done to fix it. I want to be the person that made you think that I actually could be a friend of yours. I just don't want to be me, I will be me. I decided on that as soon as the doctor told me it was cancer. I decided that the way to deal with this was to deal with it the only way I know how - by being me. So when you see me and it seems like it's still the same old Gary, know that "eye" am just being me.

I am going to UCLA for a second opinion next Tuesday with the expectation of surgery to remove the tumor within a couple of weeks, so channel your good thoughts and prayers. Funny, we found out that I have an old UCLA patient number from when we used to travel from Berdoo to Westwood to see my "eye" specialist forty some odd years ago.........