Breathing Deeply: My Life With Cystic Fibrosis

I had noticed lately that as I drive to work, the street signs are a bit blurrier than usual. Also, I had developed an annoying habit of ducking my head every so often, thinking that a bug was zooming toward me. At first I thought the blurred vision was from when my blood sugar was out of whack. I attributed the bug thing to being on levaquin (it has a tendency to make me think I'm seeing flying creatures--no lie!) Well, I was wrong. My out-of-date prescription lenses were to blame for the world's fuzzy appearance, and a huge crack in them was the true identity of said flying creature. So, it was off to the optometrist I went.

I called around and found that JCPenney Optical was fairly close by and had the best price on the eye exam. It had been more than 2 years since I last had my eyes checked, and boy oh boy had things changed. Well, maybe things haven't changed so much as the venue was different from the little place I used to go to when I lived with my folks.

The optometrist had a nifty gizmo that he used to check what my prescription was at present. I stared into a high-tech equivalent of a "Viewmaster" (remember those things?) and was told to focus on the Christmas tree in the background. The whole time I was looking at the little scene I was thinking to myself "wow, this looks a lot like one of the questions on my physics 2C exam." Here's how much of a nerd I am...I'll probably go home today and look through my old physics text book and see if I can figure out how that machine used light (optics) to calculate the aperture of my pupil in order to determine my prescription.

After the eye exam I spent WAY too much time trying to figure out which frames to get. I have such a small head that I have to get kids frames. It's a little embarassing, and there really isn't much to choose from on that section of the wall. I'm so afraid I picked something cheesy. At least I know the sunglasses I selected will look awesome. Next time, I think maybe I'll just get the inexpensive eye exam at JCPenney, and then take the prescription somewhere else where there is a better frame selection.

At any rate, in a few weeks a will be a newly be-spectacled Lauren, and I'll be able to read street signs with ease, and sit calmly without ducking away from invisible attack bugs.