Wednesday, July 06, 2005

The Good News

The good news is that in searching our bedroom earlier on this evening, I found:The bad news is that I didn't find my old glasses, and as of that moment, I was stuck.

What happened was this: I packed up my gear after sailing class tonight and loaded all of it into the van. I then took my glasses off to wipe the salt off them with my shirt. The next thing I knew, they had snapped in ½ at the bridge!

I am near-sighted, and have worn glasses since Grade 3. To give you an idea of how myopic I am, when I take off my glasses and hold my hand in front of my face, I only have to move my hand about a hand-span away from my face before its edges blur. Knowing that, you will understand that a gigantic pit suddenly made itself felt in my stomach.

I drove home in the rain with the left half of my glasses perched in wobbly fashion on my nose while I squinted my right eye. I drove slowly and gave myself a lot of room to follow the vehicles in front of me. I'm here now typing, so you know I managed to get home in one piece, but that was one of the more nerve-wracking driving adventures I've had in a while.

I did finally manage to find my old glasses, but it took searching our bedroom, the laundry closet (don't ask), our office, various drawers around the house, and then deciding to give up. In addition to the items above, I found a lot of eyeglass cases which we have collected over the years, but all of them were empty. It begs the question - why do we keep them then? I also found the Krazy Glue I had bought to fix the kid's various toys, at which point I gave up and decided to glue the frames so I could at least make it to the eye-glass shop in our building at work. I started putting away the stuff I had pulled off our living room shelves and in the kid's craft box I found yet another eyeglass case. Inside were my old eyeglasses! Eureka!

Now that they are sitting on my face, I am feeling somewhat normal again. If you aren't near-sighted, I challenge you to spend an hour or two of your day blind-folded, just to get an idea of what visually impaired people have to go through. I had to do it back in highschool for an afternoon as part of an excerise in appreciating what people with physical impairments have to deal with for their entire lives.

Still, compared to my current glasses, these frames are huge and the lenses are thick! Yech!

Hopefully, Holly, who owns the eyeglass shop in my building at work, will be able to find replacement frames, as it takes some pretty expensive lenses to fulfill my prescription.

4 comments:

Cheryl said...

sigh - we have all those becasue ever time I took my glasses in to be fixed over the past however many years - I never have a case - so whoever is fixing them - gives me another case. We keept them because I never use know where glasses cases are in the house - since I don't use them and don't realize we have them. The kids play with them mostly. I have no idea HOW your glasses case ended up in in the kids craft box but I did tell you I saw it a couple of days ago in some really bizarre place.

Anonymous said...

What a blessing that you found the old ones--at least now you can safely drive to work to meet up with Holly! If you are able to get by with the old ones for a few days, she can probably order an exact replacement frame for you.
GMP

Cheryl said...

Even more good news! Holly says that she DOES have a set of frames that match my lenses in her shop now - except they are purple. However, she has ordered them in from Calgary and they will arrive tomorrow. Woohoo!

I can't wait because these googly old things on my face are driving me nuts!

Cheryl said...

Even better news - my new frames arrived this morning and I am now once again able to see! Woohoo!

Related news - my last optometrist visit was in 2001, so I'm due for a check-up and maybe get some contacts to augment my glasses. I'll have to see if our group health plan will cover it.