RLW::THz

At least I get to leave early

I guess I'm going to be wearing my glasses for a while. I hate ('despise' or 'loathe' might give a more precise indication of intensity, but let 'hate' suffice) wearing glasses, yet it appears I will have no choice for the immediate future.

Just mere moments ago, I left my desk with the intention of purchasing a bag of Chili-Cheese Fritos from the vending machine to go with the can of Coke I already had. Between my desk and the destination mentioned above, however, my desire to make a preliminary stop became evident. As I stood attending to the matter requiring attention, I blinked in response to a sensation of slight irregularity in my left eye.

When I blinked I could tell that my left contact lens had gone out of position. This normally isn't a big deal. In fact, I've perfected (I thought) a method of closing my eye just right so that the lens would return to it's normal location, perhaps requiring a slight manual adjustment, but nothing out of the ordinary.

When I reopened my eye the lens was not back in position. With no trepidations, I simply squeezed the eye shut again hoping to contain the lens till my hands were free to readjust it. "Man, I hope it's still in my eye," I thought to myself "What a place to loose a contact- even if I found it, I'd never put it back in my eye..."

I didn't find it, though.

It's gone- lost, and as I mentioned above, even if I did find it, it would either be on the floor of the men's room or resting in an even less sanitary location which would render it totally contaminated and unusable.

So now I have one contact lens in my head. It's a little disconcerting. If my vision were not correctable with lenses I would qualify as being legally blind. The last time I had it measured it was something like 20/400 which is very, very bad. What this means is that my right eye sees and can read each character I'm typing, but my left eye perceives a fuzzy rectangular thing with some colored square-ish shapes on its surface. In order for my left eye to realize that there is text on the monitor, I have to lean forward until my forehead is about nine inches from the screen and in order to actually read it, I have to lean even closer.

It was only a few days ago that Ruth asked me about getting new contacts.

"When these wear out I'll worry about getting new ones. I don't even know where I'd go. Last time I got new ones it was at the place that had bought my records when the previous place I got'em went out of business and now the new place is out of business too!"

"You could go to [businessname] Optical. I really like them. They've fixed my glasses for free a couple of times when I lost a screw."

"Maybe I will when the time comes," I replied, totally unconscious of the ironic foreshadowing "but for right now I'm not concerned about it."

Well, now I'm concerned about it. I'm also concerned about not only finding the time to spend what'll likely end up being multiple hours getting my vision measured, corrective lenses prescribed, and an appointment made to come back and pick them up. They never seem to have my industrial strength prescription on hand. I'll also have to be concerned about paying for it all which, though not impoverishing, will almost certainly put a hitch in the ol' economic git-a-long for a while.

At least I get to leave work early. There's no way I could see well enough to drive home after dark.

Posted by Roger at November 19, 2003 04:26 PM