|
|
Side |
|
|
Return to Current IPS Features Write:
|
A word about the eyes. I have really bad eyes. Really, really bad eyes. I come from a long line of myopic squinters who are lucky to find their glasses in t he morning- even if their glasses are mere inches away from their faces. I come out of the shower and pat the floor, the counter, the ironing board..... every surface to find my vision. Did I mention that I must also have inherited a very bad memory from the same Maurer gene pool? I never can remember where I put my glasses, and of course I cannot SEE them. My impaired vision has played havoc with my life in the following ways: 1. I was called “Four Eyes” when I was a kid. 2. I was always picked last for every team in school because everyone knows that “Four Eyes cannot catch a ball”. 3. I never felt really and truly like a “cute” girl, because lurking under the contact lenses was a bona fide “Four Eyes”. 4. I cannot find my glasses in the morning, after a shower, or whenever I take out my contacts. and 5- MOST IMPORTANTLY, the poor vision really has impaired my cycling ability. Right from the start, when my hubby and I started cycling several years ago, I had to do this winky thing where I rode with one good eye open while I closed the other eye to keep the contact lens from drying out. I quickly realized that in order to cycle effectively, I was going to have to get some glasses which worked on the bike. (My balance was not that great with the one winky eye mode.) Thus began a multi hundred (and I do mean MULTI, MULTI hundred) buying spree of glasses. I tried sports goggles, transition lenses, sporty prescription sunglasses, and finally landed upon a prescription insert for true cycling sunglasses. Although my eyes were no longer burning orbs of pain in my head, I still experience no peripheral vision as well as a balance issue which seems to be getting worse by the day. My eyes hurt, I cannot descend down a hill at more than a crawl, and I have gone through a series of “wrecklettes” that have left me with no skin on my knees and a growing sense of unease. Something has to be done. So, after more than three decades as “Four Eyes” I think I am finally going to take the plunge and get the lasik eye surgery which will make me “Four Eyes” no more. It’s very scary. Not on the level that most would imagine; I am not worried about the pain, the procedure, or the cost. No, it is the little details which I have gleaned from my friend Jeanine who has had the surgery that have me in a tizzy. The first and quite possibly the most horrific detail is the fact that in order to get the surgery, I am going to have to go eye make-up-less for at least a week before the surgery. We are talking no holds barred, mascara free here, folks. I haven’t been mascara free since 1977. I wonder what color my eyelashes even are; but I can bet they are pale, listless and stumpy without the mascara. Jeanine revealed that not only shall I be the makeup less wonder, I also must wear my glasses for that same period of time. (If I can even find them without my contacts.) So I shall be an ugly, lash less, FOUR EYED FREAK for untold days before the surgery. That is just the “before”. The “AFTER” is even worse. Nightmarish, in fact. No exercise for TWO WEEKS! This I cannot fathom. My life orbits around my calorie burn from cardio work-outs. To be thrust into a forced life of leisure...... let me just say it: will make me suicidal, angry, and worst of all FAT. Because I hate to say this: I have absolutely no willpower when it comes to food. NONE. I base my many thousand calorie a day diet upon the fact that I will exercise obsessively (yes, I admit it) and burn off that excess. And yet. It must be done. I feel like I have reached a crisis point in vision and I don’t want to hang my bike up in the garage forever, to be doomed to a life exercising indoors while my friends cycle on without me. So I am going to commit to this surgery in January when the weather is cold and hopefully, if my friends are any kind of emotional support at all, they shall grow fat right along side me; their fat a beacon of true friendship.
|
