All my life, all I’ve ever wanted has been Lasik™.

Okay, not really. When I was a kid, I really really wanted glasses, so much so that I might have even lied on the eye exam (foolish, foolish girl). Mom? Dad? I’m sorry I lied on the eye exam and made you buy me glasses that you probably didn’t really have the money for and then wrecked my eyes and made it so I have to get the most expensive of all contacts available and if I had it to do over again, I would have lived my life so very differently.  I’m sorry.

I’m more sorry now than ever before, because I just talked to my optometrist the other day and he said I might be a good candidate for Lasik™, but there’s a real possibility I would still need glasses even after having the procedure done. Sad. Then, he told me he wouldn’t recommend it right now anyway because if I’m still in school (which I am and probably always will be), doing all that reading and writing and staring at a computer can continue to affect my prescription (great, I’ve chosen the one field in the world that will probably progressively destroy my eyes every day until I die), so I should wait til I graduate.  Ugh.

After that, he told me something I had never thought about, ever:

What about wearing hard contact lenses, he asked.

Say what? Hard contacts? Me? But…hard contacts stopped being cool decades ago! Hard contacts are for grannies! (This coming from a girl who was told as a teenager that she had the eyes of an eighty year-old woman {I’ve been a granny for years, really.})

The only thing I really knew about hard contacts was that when I first got contacts in the seventh grade, the optometrist recommended I go with soft lenses because I was active in sports, and soft contacts posed less of a risk of SHATTERING INSIDE MY EYEBALL if I got elbowed in the eye or something during basketball scrimmages.

All she had to say was SHATTERING INSIDE MY EYEBALL and that was the end of it—I never gave another thought to hard contacts. I knew they were not for me. I never met anyone who wore them (until years later). I just deleted them from my mind—pretended they never existed. The end.

Except it was not the end, because here I am, with the eyes, now, of a NINETY year-old woman, having just seen a new optometrist who told me quite frankly that he couldn’t believe none of my previous eye doctors (I’ve had several over the years) have never recommended hard contacts. He said he couldn’t believe I had been using the last kind as long as I had (two years), and that hard contacts would give me clearer, crisper vision than I’d ever enjoyed. He said they would change my life.

Immediately I went into shut-down mode, because that’s what I do in the face of authoritarian figures who tell me things I don’t want to hear. Because to me, hard contacts didn’t even exist. I didn’t even consider it. I couldn’t have tuned out the man better if I had stuck my arthritic fingers into my deaf little eardrums and sang, LA LA LA LA LA.  I just said, No, I’ll stick with soft lenses until I graduate and then I’ll get Lasik™; it’ll be fine.

It’ll be fine, I said, all reassuring-like, as if I knew better than the doctor. I’m so stupid.

I walked out of the exam room, feeling like my world had been turned upside-down: Hard contacts? Me? Nah…that would never happen.  But…clearer vision than I’ve ever enjoyed? That would be nice. And supposedly they don’t shatter much anymore, especially not with people as sedentary as me—I don’t think I know anybody who stays away from strenuous exercise more than me. And they’ll let my eyes breathe so much more. But I’ll only have one pair and if I lose a contact, there’s no backups, so sorry, that’ll be another three hundred dollars. GAH! Three hundred dollars! That’s insane! Actually, though, three hundred dollars is about what I’m paying for my soft contacts now—maybe even less. If I don’t screw it up and lose my hard pair, they’re supposed to last up to three years.  And…clearer vision than ever before? I can’t even imagine how nice that would be.

And that’s how it came to be that I talked myself into trying out a pair of granny contact lenses, for which I will be fitted this week, and I really hope I will like them, because clear vision sounds more delicious to me right now than a large bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream, and I’ve been sugar-free for the past several weeks, so pretty much NOTHING sounds more delicious to me than a large bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream.

But even though I’m looking forward to the mythical good vision…

…I really wish I hadn’t lied on my first eye exam all those years ago.

Kids, let this be a lesson to you.

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