Susanna J. Sturgis   Martha's Vineyard writer and editor
writer editor born-again horse girl

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Vision

January 08, 2010

Did I say my eyes are funky?

My eyes are funky. My left eye is its old familiar very nearsighted self, except that over the last seven or eight years it's done the aging/distance thing and now the same prescription won't do for both reading and seeing who's coming up the fire lane when I'm in the state forest.

My right eye, however -- well, my right eye has been messed with. Thanks to two retina reattachment surgeries, its perception is a little wavery. This is barely noticeable with medium and large objects, but it's obvious with ordinary-size type. Thanks to cataract surgery, its distance vision is pretty good without correction, but the new lens, like my aging left eye, can't handle close-up details.

Since I make my living as a copyeditor and proofreader, I have to be able to read accurately, so I have reading glasses. The discrepancy between my very nearsighted left eye and my almost normal right eye is such that the pair of glasses that accommodated both of them would be so much heavier on one side that it wouldn't sit straight on my nose. So I have a contact lens for my left eye, to bring it up to par with my right eye. I wear it all the time. I put my reading glasses on over it.

So I was just working on a hardcopy manuscript. My left eye does nearly all the work, so it took me a while to realize that seen with my right eye the letters on the page were not only wavery but blurry. I took my glasses off. Wavery and blurry. I put them back on: still wavery and blurry. Oh shit, something's gone wrong with the implanted lens.

My stove and the skylight above it, however, looked right-eye normal: a little wavery, but pretty sharp. Whathafook . . . ?

That was when I stuck my finger through the glasses frame and realized that the right lens was missing.

I barely had time to wonder if Travvy had eaten it before I found it on my top bedside bookshelf.

Before you call your optometrist, check your glasses.

 

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