Was Blind,
But Now I See
(O)ne
thing I know, that,
whereas I
was blind, now I see.
-- John 9:25b
At my first eye exam as a little girl, I
couldn't even see "The Big E," much less which way it pointed. I had to get out
of the chair and grope toward it, I was so near-sighted.
Rx: powder blue fairy wing eyeglasses. Next came
pink ones. Later, black, navy, brown and tortoiseshell.
Within a few years, they were Coke bottle
bottoms. My fate as a nerd was sealed. I even sported tape on my glasses quite
often, because I broke them frequently: smashed them on a trampoline . . .
stepped on them at the swimming pool . . . left them on the roof of our car to
sail off into some ditch in highway breezes. . . .
Home movies of me waterskiing show me squinting
desperately like Mr. Magoo in a bikini, trying to see where the water was and
the shore wasn't. Shaving my legs required contortionism to get my eyeballs
close enough to avoid bloodshed. I was always afraid my specs would go flying
off while playing sports and riding roller coasters. I looked like a total
idiot snorkeling with my glasses inside my snorkeling mask, but if I wanted to
see anything down there. . . .
Though I wore contacts through my teens and 20s,
dry eyes and astigmatism forced me back into glasses some time ago.
So you could say eyeglasses . . . framed my
life.
Not any more.
I'm FREE! Halle-LOOOO-jah! AY-men! Can I get a
WITNESS?!?
A
good-luck note left on the kitchen counter the morning of surgery.
LASIK eye surgery brought me from the brink of legal
blindness to 20/20 vision, at least for distance. Close-up sight in the right
eye is still fuzzy, and I may need to go back for a tune-up. But man! I can
see!
For years, I was afraid of LASIK. I once got all
the way to the eve of surgery, but had to cancel when I developed a sty and
discovered I was pregnant. That was quite a day! A friend solemnly decreed that
the Lord was protecting my eyesight with those two interventions. Whoa! Well, I've
never had a sty since, the other "intervention" is now 6, and many people were
encouraging me to try again. So I did.
There was an omen the night before, though. We
went out to eat, and the lights suddenly dimmed. AAAIIIEEE! Things are going
black!
Then there was a tornado warning, minutes before
my surgery.What if the building were sucked upward into a tornado's spiral
right when the surgeon was in mid-slice on my eyeballs?
But the staff put me at ease. They promised not
to say "oops" or "uh oh" during the procedure. And no chain-saw sound effects,
guaranteed.
The Valium was good. Very good. In fact, I may
need to go back several times for fine tuning and have it again. SEVERAL times.
I literally kissed my glasses goodbye and kept giggling on the table instead of
holding still.
All I remember for sure was that the actual
surgery only took a minute, giggle-free. And when the surgeon was replacing the
flaps of my eyes, he said it was like squeegeeing a windshield at a car wash. I
giggled again, for joy . . . because I could see!
I could see Maddy's freckles! I could walk in
the rain without speckles! I could read speed-limit signs! (Darn!)
I could read the newspaper; before, it was like
a ball of fuzz without my glasses. I could see my face in the mirror without
craning my neck one inch away.
The BAD news is, I also could see cobwebs, dust
bunnies and window smears. Hmm. Previous decades of nearsightedness weren't all
bad.
Just kidding. From all the angles, this is a
modern medical marvel. People in ancient times would no doubt call it a
miracle.
You know those people in the Bible whose sight
Jesus healed? I think I know now how they felt. Incomparable joy, awe and
gratitude.
My prayer is that I'll see everything more
clearly now, including spiritual things. And when I see Jesus in heaven someday,
I'm going to thank him for sending a high-tech miracle . . . for a nearsighted
wretch like me. †
