She SEES!!!

Thursday, July 31st, 2008 08:52 pm
auntbijou: (Default)
Picked up my glasses!

It's going to take some getting used to. In fact, I'm almost a bit... motion-sick!

Anyhow, I put them on and was like, "Whooooooaaaaaaa..." because, I had actually forgotten what it was like to see things clearly. Without squinting, tilting my head to the right, and angling left.

It was even more stunning when we got in the car to leave, and hit the highway back to town. I stared down the highway, then lowered the glasses to peer over them, and said, before I could stop myself, "My gods, how on earth was I managing to drive like this???"

THO sort of grimaced and said, "Yeah, see, that's what I've been so worried about. You driving so much, and knowing how bad your vision was getting."

Only thing is, I'm used to tootlin' along with my chin up. I walk that way, sit that way, drive that way... it's my parents' fault. "Sit up straight!" "Keep your shoulders back!" "Chin up, look people square in the eye, be confident, even if you aren't!"

That's great and all, but if I have my chin up while wearing these glasses, then I'm looking through the portion that's for reading, which means everything is blurry! So... I have to drop my chin a bit. It will take some adjustments, and I might head back to the optical shop in a few days to work a few more bugs out. We will see.

It's nice to be able to see clearly again, though!
auntbijou: (Default)
First off, I want to thank everyone who replied to my last post. Your support is so greatly appreciated. It's like having a whole bunch of shoulders to lean on, and that is very, very comforting, indeed!

My dad is doing some better, though a few of the things Mom has told me has me worried. Of course, I am completely unable to say anything about them to her, because if she knew about them, she'd start worrying, too, and I am unwilling to disturb her peace. The good news is, the suggestions I have made to my sisters, especially the Blonde Sister (who seems to finally recognize that I do manage to give good advice from time to time), has borne fruit, and my parents are now having someone from Eldercare Services come in once or twice a week to check on them and do things for them, like wash dishes, clean the bathrooms, etc, that they have trouble doing themselves. There also will be a therapist coming in once a day to give my dad "walking" therapy, taking him on little turns around their backyard, supervising him on their treadmill, etc. This is a great weight off my mind, as this means there is one more person checking on them, an objective eye that isn't blinded by love and the unwillingness to see that our parents are aging, and getting frail. And maybe the therapist can help convince my mom that Meals on Wheels is exactly what they need. Every time I've suggested it, she says, "Oh, I can cook just fine, don't waste it on us, let them take care of someone who really needs it."

*snorts*

We will see what we will see!

In other news, I finally saw the eye doctor today, and I will tell you, the last time I went for a vision checkup was around 1989-90. Back then, I had to have my eyes dilated, as well as numbed, and then endure having this thing pressed against my eyeball while a light was shined into it, to measure the pressure inside my eye. I was part of an on-going family study for glaucoma, which runs in my mother's family. My mother has it, and is slowly losing her vision to it, despite two surgeries specifically for her glaucoma, as well as another for cataracts. At this, she is doing better than her two of her aunts, who lost their vision completely in their seventies and were totally blind before they were eighty. I knew things had changed in eye exams, but not how much.

The Husbandly One took the day off so he could drive me, as I knew driving is nearly impossible with dilated eyes (I've tried to do it before... it wasn't pretty), and I had no intention of driving to San Marcos and back with my vision more impaired than it is.

First off... they didn't dilate my eyes.

Second off... they didn't put numbing drops in my eyes, either.

Third off, they did test my eye pressure, but not by putting something on my eye while shining a painfully bright light into it. Nope. What they did was... blow a puff of air into each eye.

[personal profile] lddurham, fear not. It is not painful, nor excruciating in the least.

I did get an indication of how bad my vision is, though, when they sat me in a chair and had me read letters mixed with numbers.

It was sad. Truly, truly sad. Auntie got them all WRONG!!! Who knew 4's looked so much like A's? Or T's and 7's look so close?

Auntie has presbyopia, which means I need glasses. And I took [personal profile] brumeux77's advice and got progressive lenses. I was also assured that should I want to try them later, I will be fitted for contacts, as well.

I may do that, but first, the glasses.

I got those flexible frames that will hopefully survive the worst punishment I can put them through, thin wire glasses, though I did want to try frameless, but... they won't hold my lenses, though they're the thinnest lenses possible for my vision. I go through an embarrassing amount of sunglasses, because they get sat on, stepped on, flung against walls, twisted... very rarely by me. In fact, the sunglasses I had for the longest time, a pair of el cheapo Wayfarer knock-offs I got at the Mercado del Sol in Houston, lasted for nearly seven years. They got stepped on, sat on, run over by a car, slammed into a door, dropped from a second floor balcony onto a flagstone courtyard, nicked by a knife someone threw at me during a fight at a club (don't worry, dears, Auntie was fleeing with her friends, dragging them along, and she ducked and never, ever went to that club again), and those sunglasses never got scratched, never lost their shape. I was beginning to call them the Sunglasses That Would Never Die... until after THO and I got a puppy when we were first married, a goofy Labrador Retriever puppy who chewed them to pieces in ten seconds flat.

*sigh*

And no, I was not tempted to get that same type of frame, because honey, the frames that look so cool as Wayfarer sunglasses? When you make them into regular glasses? Well, when you're in the military, they call them "BC Glasses." BC as in... Birth Control. As in, you wear those glasses, you ain't gettin' any. Unless you know someone with a glasses fetish for that particular frame. Otherwise, you ain't gettin' laid. Ever.

Anyhow, I should be getting my new glasses by either the end of this week, or early next week. YAY! It'll be nice to be able to read street signs again without having to ask Miss Priss, "Are we at Slaughter Creek Lane yet?" or, "Is that the exit for Sixth Street?"

By the way, I found out my itchy eyes aren't itching because of my allergies. Well, not directly. They're itching because they're DRY! Apparently, my thyroid medication, and the Singulair, as well as the Zyrtec-D I take for my allergies and asthma, are drying me out, which I knew, but as well as drying out my skin, they're also drying out my eyes So I now need to use eye-drops about three times a day to lubricate my eyes.

Okay, so now something ELSE I have to remember to do every day? Oh well, it is what it is! At least I know why now, instead of wondering if it was just allergies out of control!

Well, time for Auntie to turn in. And in case I haven't said it before, thank you all for being my friends.

*gives you all a great big Auntie hug*
auntbijou: (Default)
First off, [personal profile] failuresofine, your package arrived, and it FITS!!!

Who knew our wrists were the same size??

I'm wearing it right now, and it looks so cool!!!

YAY!!!

In other news, I've finally made an appointment to see an eye doctor next Monday. (I can hear Char's snort of disgust and her shout of, "It's about TIME!!" all the way over here, and it's makin' my ears ring, dontcha know!)

I had one of those moments of epiphany Sunday. My vision has been getting progressively blurrier, and blurrier, and it wasn't that I didn't want to go, it was just... something always came up, and I would have to take care of that something first. So, I need reading glasses to read a book. Okay, I bought reading glasses. However, now I can't read street signs until I'm practically on top of them, and depend on recognizing the shape of words when I tried to read them.

Well, the final blow came at the grocery store yesterday. I've had headaches for a couple of weeks now that I just can't shake, and thought maybe it was sleep deprivation (we're having issues with kids sleeping in their own beds right now), but... no.

We had gone to the grocery store, and my headache just kept getting worse, and worse, and I was struggling to read labels, having to dig out my reading glasses, and then struggling to read the signs on the aisles. Well, the "a-ha!" moment came when I was standing at the end of one aisle, looking at a refrigerated section directly across, thinking, "Is the sliced cheese here or further down?" and I was squinting, trying to force my eyes to focus... and it just wasn't happening. Then I turned to say something to the Husbandly One, who I thought was right behind me, but... he wasn't there. So I looked farther down the aisle, and saw three blobs in the middle of the aisle.

I could not make out anything beyond three people shaped blobs, and the colors they were wearing, and I realized it was THO, the Impossible Son, and the Impertinent Daughter, and I recognized them solely because of the color of clothing they were wearing.

Time to go to the eye doctor.

And that's when I realized why I've had such a nasty headache. Because I'm constantly trying to focus... and I can't!! So, yeah, going to the eye doctor, and I have a feeling I'm probably going right past regular glasses and straight toward bifocals.

*sigh*

That makes me feel OLD!!!

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