Ocular Misadventures-Part Deux

[FYI, this will be my last post for a couple of weeks.  I’m off again tomorrow on another AGMA travel adventure!  I’ll miss ya’ll!]

In my elementary school, each class marched into the nurses office once a year to read an eye chart. They wanted to make sure our vision was okay.  I guess my eyes were passable through 5th grade. All hell broke loose in 6th grade.

I started squinting to see the chalkboard.  Very gradually – so gradually that I never really noticed – the moon developed a hazy ring around it.  Trees branches lost their definition.  The world became a soft, fuzzy place with blurred boarders.  Everything looked like it was surrounded by blobs of cotton candy.

In 7th grade, I went to a “proper” eye doctor.  Turns out I had become extremely near-sighted.  Duh…  I needed glasses.  This was a death sentence to a tween girl.

I was going to be a four eyes.

I didn’t like getting glasses.  They felt odd on my face and made my eyes look beady.  But it was wonderful being able to read the chalkboard and see individual leaves on a branch.  The moon and car headlights didn’t have halos around them.  The world was in sharp focus – at least visually.

But I was desolate.  Everybody knows, “Boys never make passes at girls who wear glasses.”  Pigs.

In high school, I traded in my glasses for big girl contact lenses. They weren’t particularly comfortable and were a royal pain to take care of, but I was “make a pass at” eligible again.  Nobody did.  Pigs.

In college, the abuse started.  Many nights I would fall asleep (pass out?) with my contacts still in my eyes.  The next morning I’d have to chisel them out.  Ouch.  Going to college in Texas, then Arizona, there was no shortage of windblown sand and dust.  Ouch again. And when I “slept over” and didn’t have my contact solution, I spit on my contacts to put them back in my eyes in the morning. That is assuming I actually took them out the night before and put them in the closest thing resembling a Dixie Cup for safe storage.

It’s amazing I have any sight left at all.

I wore contacts until I was in my early 30s.  After the birth of my second child, I didn’t have time to fool with all that contact lens nonsense.  Married for 6+ years, I figured two kids sealed the deal so I didn’t have to worry my looks anymore.  I started wearing glasses again.  I honestly don’t think my husband even noticed.  He’s an absent minded professor type…  I still don’t think he’s noticed.

Round about the time life started to settle down again for a minute (meaning the kids went off to college), I started thinking about wearing contacts again.  But damn…now I needed readers for seeing things close up.  Even if I got contacts, I’d still have to wear glasses for any “close up” stuff which is like 50% of the time.  Crap.

I could get those “Jekyll and Hyde” contact lenses where one eye has a distance contact in it and the other has a close up reading contact. Really?  They say that your brain gets used to seeing catawampus. I’m pretty sure my brain is already working to it’s maximum catawampus capacity.  I seriously don’t want to confuse it any more than it already is.  Besides, the whole thing just sounds creepy…

I opted for progressive, no-line bifocal glasses.  The lenses look like “normal” lenses, but they’re very sneaky.  The top part is for distance and the bottom part is for reading and, true to the advertising, there is NO LINE.  Nifty…but I’m STILL wearing glasses.

Shelley at Destinationnow.me commented on my last post that she had new eyeball lens implants when she had surgery to remove her cataracts.  She’s glasses free because one lens implanted is for close up vision and the other lens is for distance. Still kinda creepy, but the idea of having nearly perfect vision and never wearing any corrective lens ever again is somewhat intoxicating.

So, in ten years, when I get my cataracts removed, provided I don’t contract ebola and die in the meantime, I will, once again, be “make a pass at” eligible!  I’ll be nearly 71.

Get in line boys….get in line.  My dance card is fillin’ up fast!

Behave while I’m gone!