Legally Blind Without Correction

      I am legally blind without correction. This is not something that usually concerns me. Lots of people are legally blind without correction. They will make some kind of notification on my driver's license about this. It is not a big deal. I'm certain, in fact, that you know some people who are also legally blind without correction. They are probably old. They almost assuredly wear thick glasses. It is not likely they worry much about their condition.
      I don't worry about it except for a few times a year when I have to go to the eyedoctor or my prescription level comes up in conversation or something of that nature. I don't worry about it because I wear contacts. If it means anything to you my contact prescription is negative eight and my glasses are very nearly negative ten in both eyes. I wear my contacts for about ten hours comfortably during the day and somewhere between two and six hours very mildly itchy or dry. I've never had any problems with my contacts. I know some people can't wear them because they're prone to infections or lesions or the other things my ophthalmologist likes to try to terrify me with under the guise of informing me of the dangers each year when I order new contacts. I wake up in the morning, open my contact case, pop the contacts into my eyes and get up and go pee. At night I take them out, clean them, put them in their case, read Dilbert comics very close to my face, and go to sleep. Contacts allow me more or less perfect vision and peripheral vision (unlike glasses which you can see the frames of and force you to turn your head to look at things).
      That's the reason I don't worry about my blindness. It's really only when you're legally blind to the point where they can no longer help you that you should be concerned. I can get glasses, I can get contacts even. And I'll be able to do this for some time. When I'm older I plan to get lasic surgery. So how little I can see when my contacts are out hasn't bothered me much. Until this past weekend.
      I'm sure you'd realized already that I was leading up to something. I usually am. Last week my nephew was sick again. Fever, runny nose, clingy syndrome (which probably indicates that he feels nauseous or gross and just can't tell us) and started to leak gross stuff from his eyes. He's not yet two and so obviously wasn't interested in cleaning gross stuff from his own eyes. When he went to the doctor they said he had conjunctivitis and a ear infection but that he was no longer contagious and could go back to daycare. He was given a prescription for immoxicillan that cleared up the eyejunk almost immediately.
      My brother and nephew's mother both somehow escaped contracting conjunctivitis despite the fact that it is very contagious. I did not. Friday I noticed that my left eye felt weird and maybe slightly painful but I didn't think about it too much even when I agreed to come in to work on what would have been a day off for me to cover someone else's shift. My shift, despite being short as shifts go, was miserable because my eye had started to leak crap and it hurt a lot. I looked up about conjunctivitis on the computer up front when my coworker was on break. It wasn't tough to conclude that I had it but what was much harder to swallow was that I should not wear contacts if I had it.
      When I came home after work I located my glasses and removed my contacts and threw them away. I was in pain and I couldn't see and I didn't bother trying with the glasses. I sat in the living room with my eyes closed and listened to stand-up comedy that my brother and my nephew's mother and our friend were watching.
      Since I couldn't wear contacts you might wonder why I didn't just wear my back-up glasses and continue as normal. Despite the fact that I have very carefully kept these glasses, they fit me and are not broken, they wouldn't actually do me much good. I've had this same pair of glasses since I first started wearing contacts around eight years ago. My eyesight has changed a lot since then. When I wore the glasses and blew up all of the text on my computer screen and sat very close to it I could just about pretend I could see. If I wore the glasses in the kitchen I could search for things in the cupboards but this very quickly gave me a whomping headache. Sitting at my computer with them on much less quickly gave me a whomping headache but the headache, once achieved by any means, was pretty much impossible to get to go away. If I wore the glasses while trying to walk I felt dizzy and nauseous and as though I might fall over.
      The ironic thing is that last time I went to the eyedoctor, this past February, he gave me a prescription slip with my glasses prescription so I could get myself a cheap back-up pair somewhere. I had actually tried to do this in the middle of last week but had trouble deciphering his handwriting and also discovered that my PD number was missing. I had my brother measure that on Saturday and ordered some glasses with his assistance but that wasn't really going to help me at the present time.
      I briefly, but only briefly, thought about going to the doctor. I didn't end up going. This was largely because I realized I had this friday afternoon when I was already at work and as one of the millions of Americans without health insurance I couldn't justify going in to anything other than the walk-in care that's open during the week. Which meant that if I wasn't better by monday I could go and spend money being diagnosed with an illness I already knew I had and get a prescription for immoxicillian which I didn't really want.
      Sans contacts because of illness and sans glasses of the right prescription I had to call out of work on Saturday due to blindness and felt very bad about it. I spent most of Saturday sitting in the dark in my room with my eyes closed, trying to ignore my pounding headache and listen to the Harry Potter Audiobook my brother had helped me download while I braided pieces of string together as I found it hard to sit still and "read" Harry Potter without doing something with my hands. I also puzzled over the familiarity of the narrator's voice until I realized it was the same guy who narrated a weird little kids show called Pocoyo which my nephew has a DVD of.
      On Sunday we went and did laundry. Which was an intriguing task sans contacts and occasionally removing my glasses from the top of my head and putting them on my face to puzzle out unfamiliar washers and dryers at a different laundromat than the one we typically frequented. Behind this one there was a park that we went to while the clothes washed. I did what I usually do when we go to the park. I sat on the grass and once or twice climbed the structure because I find this to be a fairly irresistible and safe thing to do even though I couldn't see it well.
      The weirdest part of Sunday was going grocery shopping. Again at a different store than we usually go to. When standing in the produce section I could see well enough to tell where the bananas were because they were very yellow and could not be mistaken for anything but bananas. But I couldn't tell you what brand of bananas they were so I didn't buy any out of the fear of buying some expensive yuppy brand. Everything else in the produce section was pretty much a mystery to me. There were a lot of green and brown things which I could probably have identified if I brought them very close to my face but mostly I walked around in blissful ignorance. I only wanted four things so I just followed my nephew's mother around and wondered what might be on the shelves around me. The only aisle I correctly identified was the wine aisle. It's hard to mistake the wine aisle even when it is just a fairly uniform green blur. It was the green and the lack of obvious variation that gave it away. I ended up actually paying in cash instead of attempting to run my card and nearly walked out without my milk because I couldn't see it.
      My inability to see took away my favorite activities. I couldn't watch any movies or bad television. I couldn't really play with my nephew. I couldn't walk outside. I couldn't use the computer without killing my eyes. I couldn't write. I could just about cook something simple that didn't require chopping. And I could not read. Without glasses the world blurred into a bland texturelessness that made it hard for me to tell where there might be script at all, never mind deciphering it. And I will tell you that this was a very boring, painful, itchy, goopey world that I would not want to revisit.