My parents' living room was a rectangle and back in the day, before flat screens, our very square television was a solid 15 feet from the couch. They had a sweet La-Z-Boy positioned just a few feet from the TV but unfortunately, as an eight-year-old, I was never given permission to sit there. We didn’t have cable, and there was nothing to watch outside of Saturday morning cartoons, which I always enjoyed at my grandmother's house while I vacuumed and dusted her living room for her for a dollar and a doughnut.
However, on summer evenings my parents would always watch a movie at exactly 8 PM. My dad would trek down to the local video store and pick the latest and greatest new release for us to watch as a family. I would gather a few pillows and a blanket and position myself alongside the La-Z-Boy. This spot in the living room enabled me to be an arm’s-length from my mom and the television. I thought the reason why I had to sit so close place because the TV was so small and so damn far from the couch. It wasn’t until I failed the classic nurse's office eye test in third grade that I realized it wasn’t normal to stand awkwardly close to someone in order to see them.
My first pair of frames were classic: I got to select from a rack especially for my parents' insurance coverage (which, to this day, I still tell my parents that it was the "poor people's" glasses rack.) I think they were pink or peach and they were really big and really round and covered from over my eyebrows to solidly onto my cheekbones. Just to make it extra exciting, this first pair of glasses were also bifocals and, if you recall, back in the 80's there were no fancy lenses that hid your bifocals and there was no fancy process to make your really thick glasses thinner. I can remember, clear as day, putting the glasses on my face for the first time and it blew my mind. It was a little challenging at first; the doctor's office was on the second floor and I lifted my legs higher than necessary when navigating down the stairs due to my depth perception adjustment with the bifocal. We stopped at Woolworth's after the appointment and I was astonished to be able to distinguish between every leaf on every tree and every blade of grass and every face that passed by me on the sidewalk. I got used to the glasses after a few weeks and life was smooth sailing with 20/20 vision.I wore those glasses, or something similar, for another six years and let’s just say I didn’t win any beauty contest or have lines of admirers. My big plastic glasses, chapped lips, pig tails and flat chest where the perfect awkward, preteen package. As it turns out, a few years later, my mom got a job working for our eye doctor and I was able to convince her that I was responsible enough for contact lenses. I needed them for gymnastics because I could not see what the hell I was doing and it’s probably not the safest thing to be flipping through the air or trying to grab onto a bar or a beam when you can’t really see it. She let me buy a pair of lenses and anybody who wore contacts in the late 80's and early 90's remembers the ones I’m talking about. They were soft but they were $99 a contact and you had to clean them every night by putting them in a special container with two baskets and an enzyme tab and God help you if you forgot to put the enzyme tab in and then put them in your eyes the next day. Also God help you if you can’t see to the point that you didn’t realize you didn’t put the lens in a case overnight and it dried out and you tried to rinse it off and put it in your eye and then had to deal with the wrath of telling your mother that you ripped a $99 contact lens.
Thankfully, as is the case with most technology, I was able to move away from super expensive contacts that last you a year and into disposable lenses. But that’s jumping way too far into the future so let’s back up for a minute. We are all familiar with the story of the kid with glasses and braces get contacts at the same time as her braces are removed and she goes from being a caterpillar to a beautiful, elegant butterfly. I got to ditch the retainer and the glasses but unfortunately, I still had the big nose, the thin and mousy brown hair, flat chest and general weirdness, so maybe I didn’t come out of my cocoon to become a butterfly but I guess I was at least a decent looking moth.
I’ve lived for so long wearing contacts for the majority of my days that really only my family who live with me but even know that I have a vision impairment. I was so comfortable and so happy wearing contacts that I never wore my glasses except at bedtime when I would put them on to read or watch TV, fall asleep with them on, and wake up with them sort of bent underneath me in the morning. Then, I got old. Over the last few years I’ve noticed that my contacts felt more and more dry and I was more apt to put on my crooked glasses way before bedtime. During an eye appointment, two years ago, my eye doctor told me it was time to accept that I was getting older and that it was likely I would need to start wearing glasses more frequently. It was also at this time that, after years of plateauing with my prescription, it changed again pretty significantly requiring me to go back to bifocals. I walked out of his office and disregarded everything he said and continued to wear my contacts for 12 to 14 hours every day and my crooked glasses in the evening. I was not ready to give up my footloose and fancy glasses-free lifestyle yet.
Then came the Great Glasses Incident of winter 2018. Following an evening of debauchery, I was spending some quality time with the porcelain goddess and my glasses were positioned beside me on the floor. My wonderful, and large, husband came to my side to rub my back and, with my face in the toilet, I heard a horrible, horrible sound. And my crooked frames snapped under the weight of his gigantic foot. I pulled my head from the bowl and looked up it is blurry face and cried/yelled at him. I don’t remember what happened next but either he or I picked up my frames that had been pretty much snapped in half. I knew I couldn’t go without glasses so I brought my injured frames to the local optometrist and he laughed and told me that there was no way to repair my 10-year-old, demolished frames. I had no choice at that moment but to fill the dreaded old lady eye glass prescription. My optometrist promised me that my super cute new frames would change my life and not just because they were super cute and stylish but because I would actually be able to see (because apparently I had been seeing at about 70% with my contact lenses and old glasses).
It was like 1987 all over again when I picked up my glasses because I could see stuff but I hadn't realized I wasn’t really seeing and yes, this is somewhat terrifying, as Andy has pointed out to me, because I didn’t know it until I got the new glasses but I couldn’t really see signs as well when driving or basically anything, to be honest, until it was close up. Getting those glasses was like a brand new day and I now have special, bionic eyes or at least the same kind of eyes that everybody else has. But here’s the deal: these glasses cost a ton of money not because there’s some fancy frame but because I asked the optometrist to give me all the bells and whistles so that they would be light and also so that the bifocal would be hidden from view. Since I now feel like I’m wearing some sort of delicate gemstone ring on my face I have this worry all of the time about someone getting near me and knocking them off my face or of me falling and breaking them.
It’s just not that buying a new pair would be painful for the purse, it would mean that I literally could go nowhere and do nothing because my sight is so bad that I can’t see anything without the glasses on. Sure, I could throw in the contacts and try to see at 70%, which would be better than nothing ,but it wouldn’t be an ideal situation. Since getting the new glasses I’ve been panicking on several occasions and Andy and the kids (who both wear glasses)like to poke fun at me. I wanted to make them understand how I feel or try to get them to conceptualize what I see or rather don't see. I have something like 20/500 vision. The best I can do to get them to understand and to have them (quickly) put the glasses on their own faces. That always freaks them out.
Ok, I don’t have to walk around with a cane and I’m thankful for that. Getting used to wearing glasses again has definitely been an adjustment and I’m trying to figure out how to do a lot of things that are not as comfortable or easy with glasses on, like running, biking yoga and swimming. Soon we will be going on vacation and we’re headed to the beach and, as I normally do every evening, drifting off to sleep and listing off all the things I am anxious about, what always pops up is how in the hell am I going to see the sharks in the water when I’m at the beach. I’m going to get eaten, or my kids are going to get eaten, because I’m not gonna see that fin sticking up out of the water.
If you are laughing right now it’s because you are not visually impaired you do not understand the hardships of not really being able to see. I’ll never be in the Air Force and I’ll never be a lifeguard and I will never be able to lay sideways on a pillow and watch TV. My optometrist told me that if I were born 200 years ago I actually probably would be dead. Bless technology and innovation, man. Every day I am thankful for cars and electricity and washing machines and tampons, the pill and iPhones and the Internet, and definitely I am thankful for the invention of contacts and eyeglasses and all the fancy machinery that enables those of us with vision problems to go about our days without thinking too much about our visual challenges.
My small, life-long health issue also makes me thankful that this has been my biggest health struggle to date. Well, and my teeth. They suck, too. There are available corrections for my impairment which makes my biggest worry whether or not to wear glasses on a roller coaster. My small, life-long health issue is indeed expensive and health insurance (I miss the insurance rack, Mom and Dad!) doesn't cover any of the cost of contacts or glasses and again, I am thankful that I can afford contacts and the fanciest lenses. What about people who can't? What about people who have much bigger, life threatening health issues and don't have health insurance or do and can't afford the huge premiums and deductibles? I get angry thinking that I have to pay for a health issue that I didn't cause and have no control over. There are millions of people who don't get angry.
They don't get angry because they don't have a choice. They just don't take their medication, or they put off going to the doctor, or they have a medical device that isn't what's best for them, or more comfortable, or convenient, because they have to choose between feeding their kids and their own health.
For anybody out there who isn't an advocate for more comprehensive, fair and accessible healthcare, listen up. There are a million things I can't do if I can't see but it boils down to this: access to healthcare and health resources enable me to life a full, and hopefully, long life. Don't we all deserve the opportunity to life our fullest lives?
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