Sometimes we just want to see.
I woke up a week ago, same as always: perhaps a little too early but grateful for the coffee, the silence, and the books1 that accompany the darkness of morning.
Perhaps like you, my vision is not exactly picture-perfect. I generally wear glasses at night and in the early morning hours, but then, when daylight arrives, I prefer to wear contacts. On the day in question, I popped my contacts into my eyes. I took the dog for a walk. But when I sat down to write an email a little while later, something seemed a little off.
My left eye was not seeing as well as my right — in fact, it seemed to have worsened several degrees. I closed my right eye, and then my left; I went back and forth, back and forth, closing one eye at a time like you do at the eye doctor, further confirming that I was not seeing as well in my left eye as I had been the day before.
As I am then sometimes prone to do, my mind began to wander, to employ a little bit of that thing called imagination.
I’d just had pink eye a couple of weeks earlier in that same eye, and now that eye had gotten blurrier. Had I contracted some sort of bacterial disease? Should I have used antibiotic drops instead of letting the virus run its course? Should I not have worn my contacts so soon, not have later dabbed mascara on my eyelashes, not have used that contact solution for relief?
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