the blind gain sight… not really

Okay, so the title of this post is a bit melodramatic, but let me give some background. Flash back to 1990ish. If my memory serves me correctly, I began to pester my mom to take me to the eye doctor. My mom thinks I’m fabricating an account of near-blindness to score some cute (albeit unwarranted) glasses and holds off. I’m a poor, neglected middle child. That’s just how we roll. Anyway, she finally takes me to the eye doc and is told that my vision was, indeed, terrible and I needed glasses asap. (Sorry, mom. This isn’t a guilt trip. I’m just telling it as it is. Promise.)

Years pass, glasses turn into contacts, and Lasik eye surgery emerges. For some reason (probably out of guilt from aforementioned story), my parents decide to allow me to get my eyeballs lasered. The only hitch: they make this decision while I’m in Kenya for a summer. In one of her more impressive feats, my mom was somehow able to contact me while I was living in a tent in the bush of Kenya to inform me that I needed to stop wearing contacts in prep for my upcoming eye surgery.

Lasik surgery was completed, I could see, and life was grand. But somehow along the way, I began to notice my world getting blurrier and blurrier. Finally, I dragged myself out of denial and scheduled myself an appointment with a local optometrist a few weekends ago. Lo and behold, my eyes were failing me once again. Apparently, I was lasered just a few years too early*… technology has advanced since then, plus my hormones from the 3.5 years I have spent preggo or nursing may have messed with my sight. Furthermore, so much of my cornea was cut off that my poor little eyeballs are now probably too flat for contacts to fit correctly. So, glasses it was.

Long story shorter… I picked up my glasses last weekend while, incidentally, my parents were visiting. You know, to create a full-circle kind of deal for my once-doubting mother**. As soon as I slipped on my new specs, my world was seriously rocked. I could see! The techs and my mom cracked up at my reaction. “You look like Helen Keller regaining sight,” someone said. Dude, I know! That’s exactly how I felt!

So, Monday I rolled up to work in my cute new glasses and immediately announced to my coworkers, “Guys! Check out my new glasses! Don’t I look soooo smart?!”

Three seconds later… “Catherine. Did you realize you’re wearing two different shoes?”

Sure enough, I look down. One brown shoe, one black. Sweet. Thankfully, my middle-aged boss loaned me some very middle-aged looking shoes so that I could carry on with matching footwear.

Perhaps glasses don’t solve everything after all.

The end.

* Nothing against Lasik eye surgery. Seriously, I would do it all over again in a heartbeat. I went from super blind to not blind at all to only a little blind. It’s been amazing.
** No really, mom. No hard feelings.