Monday, September 28, 2009

The keys to our souls

Y'all know that I've go VERY bad vision. I'm not even on the 20/20 scale. The docs just say my vision in the negatives. I'm -11.75. That's me! Because my eyes are so bad and because I've got astigmatism, I wear gas permeable lenses. For those of you with 20/20 vision that means I wear hard lenses.

Anyway, about 4 weeks ago I knew I'd got a small tear or something in my eye. Those of you who wear hard lenses know the feeling when you've accidentally hurt your eye. Your eyes ache a bit when you put the contacts in them. So what I did was to sparingly wear my contacts for when I drove the kids to school and picked them up. I'd wear my glasses the rest of the day and put in eye drops in a couple times a day.

About a week after I started wearing my contacts like I normally do, but I noticed something. My left eye wasn't focusing as well as it used to. I could see up close just fine but focusing at a distance was a challenge. I scheduled an eye appointment with my opthamologist and it was set for Thursday, Sep 24th at 8:30am.

I've been nervous about this since I figured it out. I think this is probably one of the elements in my life that made me end up with a visit to the ER last week. You see, my father has really bad eyesight. Not only has he been nearsighted for as long as I can remember, he's also got glaucoma. They tried to repair some issue with his left eye but something happened and he is now basically blind in that eye. So I've been nervous. Really nervous about something being seriously wrong with my left eye.

But last week, I ended up going into the ER on Wednesday night. And I was still awaiting testing on Thursday morning. So as I lay in bed in the ER, I called up the opthamologist office and canceling my appointment and rescheduled. Unfortunately I wouldn't be able to see my opthamologist until Oct 19th!!!

In the hopes that someone would cancel, I called the opthamologist at 9am this morning as I went for a short morning walk. And the gal said they had an opening at 10am today. TEN?!? Yes. I would be there. I hustled my bustle home at a quick trot, took a quick rinse, and drove off. I called the Hubs as I got on the freeway to make sure I had the quickest route to the doc.

Thankfully, I did make it to the appointment with 2 minutes to spare. I saw another opthamologist in the practice, but I didn't care. He checked out my eyes with my contacts. He checked my sight with my glasses. He checked my eye pressure (for the glaucoma). He looked at my retina. Everything looks healthy. But he did say that my eyes are dry, so I should be putting rewetting drops into my eyes about 3-4 times per day.

That's it! Can you believe it? That's it!!! I am ecstatic. The doc said that if my eyes are dry then the contacts won't fit/slide like they normally do. If I keep my eyes lubricated, then the contacts will be able to work effectively as they should.

[sigh] One less stress off my mind. Maybe this'll help my blood pressure go down?

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