they say vision

Tuesday night, you stay at work late trying to get a jump on the coming holiday week. Your BF's traveling for work, so it's a good night to camp out at the office 'til 9 or 10 wrapping up stories. It's been a hellish week already, with three freelance projects due at once, plus a short story to wrap up and a writing group to host.

You feel the stress in your eyes. It's not quite been two years since you lost your glasses (maybe on a dance floor somewhere, but you still suspect your BF's former dog ate them) and got contacts instead. Which are fine, so long as you don't stare at computer screen too long. Tuesday, you log almost 12 hours in front of one monitor or another.

At home that night, laptop a blazin', your optical nerves officially go on strike. There's a nagging itch in the right eye, prompting you to remove your contacts earlier than normal. You leave the contact case in an unusual place in the bathroom, and for some reason don't screw the lid back on one side. A few minutes later, there's a clicking crash in the hallway. The BF tells you he's knocked your contacts off into the floor. Both lenses are lost. No big deal, right? You're more worried about your right eye. Ever since taking the contacts out, the vision on that side has remained cloudy. Which happens sometimes, but not usually this much.

The next morning, all day really, you drift around in a cloud. You decide not to wear your contacts, give the old eyes a rest for a day. Now, it's not like you're screwed without the lenses: You can certainly walk to work without fear of getting hit by a bus. But the world of clarity extends three, maybe four feet from your face. Everything beyond that, haze. Your head hurts. You start to freak out.

This is it, you think. I'm going blind. Diabetes? That's what happened to Aunt Alice. She lost her vision at, what, age 40? It's hitting me a lot sooner. Too much fucking sugar in my coffee. I knew it. I knew it!

Somehow you survive the workday, still in cyclops mode. That's the freaky thing: You're left eye seems to be OK. It's the right eye making life suck. But it doesn't look red or puffy. You do recall a day on the street when a passing gravel truck sped past on 7th Avenue, leaving a curtain of grit in its wake. Maybe one of those microscopic bits of granite has lodged itself in your cornea? A friend's mom recently had her retina detach without warning. Maybe you're next.

You've seen the blind folks tapping their way along 23rd Street. You always wonder, where are they going? There's some sort of center for the vision impaired near 5th Avenue, but why the East-West migration? You close your eyes and see yourself joining them, carrying the white and red stick, asking strangers for help. God knows you love huge black sunglasses, but what good are they if you can't see them yourself?

Thursday comes and genuine panic sets in. The right eye feels less irritated. But the world remains as blurred as ever. You put your day's obligations on hold and make an appointment with the eye doctor you saw last April. You call your mom. This is serious. If you're going blind, you're not going down without a fight.

Dr. G, a skinny and cute thirtysomething chick of Indian descent, gave you the single best eye exam of your life last time around, and you know she'll break the news to you gently that you only have 48 hours left to see. Her assistant does the normal tests, first for pressure, then the one with the little farmhouse in the distance. You'll miss that farmhouse, once your vision goes.

In Dr. G's chair, you explain your symptoms and she nods with empathy. She looks closely at the right eye and makes a "Hmmmmmm" sound. Not good.

"There are signs of abrasion here, some scarring," she says. "Have you had anything in your eye recently?"

That damn gravel truck. You knew it!

"But there's nothing under your lids now," she continues. "And the scrapes are so slight, I don't think this is causing your problem. It explains the irritation, but your vision should be fine."

What! Wait a sec. This can't be! You're about to demand a second opinion when she says, "You do realize, you still have your left contact in?"

You're silent.

No way.

But it's true. Tuesday night, you took out the right contact and somehow skipped the left. And you never realized it, due to the case getting knocked over. How. Fucking. Stupid.

Your face flushes red. Dr. G, always a vision of calm, chuckles. "It happens," she says. "I had one lady put two contacts in one eye and walk around like that for two days." But her words don't make you feel any better. You remove the left contact and, sure, enough, problem solved. The doctor gives you a prescription for some strong eye drops, to fix the irritation in the right, and offers advice on where to go for Lasik.

On the walk home, both contacts out now, the city appears consistenly cloudy in both eyes. It's comforting, sort of, and also terrifying. For two days you were convinced that your right eye had launched a revolt against the rest of your body. Or, even worst, that the brown globe of vision had decided it would be the first part of this creaking organism to die.
But in actuality, the right side revealed a true, unaided view of the state of your universe. It was lefty who was cheating, pretending to be something he's not. What you deemed the norm, the truth, simply wasn't.

At the corner of 8th Avenue and 19th, a gray-haired lady is walking a small Jack Russel Terrior. Even in your haze, you can see that the poor puppy has only one eye. You think to yourself, "Thank god that's not me."