Living the Nightmare

I've been wearing glasses since I was 6, contacts since I was 15. One year shortly after that, the doctor was going to move my right contact to my left eye and order a new right contact. But then he kept getting it backwards, and wouldn't listen to me. I got upset—like, verge-of-anxiety-attack upset, and my mother couldn't figure out why.

I realized it was because the doctor hadn't given me my contacts back, and I couldn't see. That ramped up my anxiety to 11, and ever since, my most common recurring nightmare has been fuzzy vision.

Today, I started living my nightmare.

Okay, that's overly dramatic. But I'm very nearsighted, and clarity is literally 6 inches in front of my face (I just measured). I wear rigid gas permeable contacts, which change the shape of your cornea, and my glasses prescription is set for that shape. So when I'm out of my contacts even overnight, the glasses aren't strong enough. Which is why I never wear my glasses. Five minutes in the morning, half an hour at night, that's it.

But because those contacts change my cornea, I have to be out of them for 4 weeks before pre-op testing for LASIK, which is a week before the operative consult, which is a week before the surgery. So six weeks of the entire world being slightly out of focus.

it's almost enough to make me forget about doing it!

I got up this morning with a low-burning anxiety over this. You know how they say people don't like clowns because their real faces are hidden? Try completely featureless blobs. THAT'S truly freaky. Of course, the glasses are good enough, so it's not that bad. But I'm on edge, working too hard to accommodate it.

I tell myself six weeks will fly by, but on this end of it, it seems like forever. The worst part is that there's a chance they tell me I'm not a good candidate, or they can't correct enough to be worth it. THAT would seriously suck.

So what's your worst minor nightmare? Have you ever had to live it?