Month: December 2020

I had my overdue contact eye exam on December 16th and have been wearing daily disposable contacts since then. About a week after my appointment, I had to go back into the Eye Care center to get my contact prescription adjusted with a contact lens technician because my prescription proved to be a little too high and was giving me a headache. My prescription changed from an 8 to a 7 meaning that I am NOT totally blind but just MOSTLY blind.

I will say that having daily disposable contacts has taken some time to get used to. First of all, this is the first time I have worn contacts that are not tinted blue because they are so disposable, they don’t need to be. In addition, it is the weirdest thing to just throw them out at the end of the day. That part is very hard to get used to and it feels so wasteful. At the end of the day, after I brush my teeth, I take one square of toilet paper and place it in my right hand. I take my contact out and place it on the toilet paper square. Once I have both contacts there, I fold the square up and then throw it away. I always think of this cartoon that I saw when I was a child:

My Mom laughs at me and tells me that I don’t need to be so careful because I am just going to throw them away. I tell her that I have worn contacts for 26 years and that old habits die hard. I am so used to taking great care of my contacts for so long that and feels so foreign and wrong to just throw my contacts out at the end of the day. The other day, after I took one contact out and carefully placed it into the square of toilet paper, my Mom grabbed it up and ripped it in half! She laughed as I had a mini stroke.

Another thing that has taken some time to get used to is having to open a new package every day for each contact. I no longer store them overnight but I have to peel the foil wrapping off of a brand new package every day.

Because I am so blind as I am trying to open the package, I have to hold it close to my face. I pull the foil wrapper away from the saline solution that holds the contact and because it is so close to my face, I get squirted with that solution every single day! Today was no different! It is usually on my left cheek or the left side of my upper lip. A few times, it has been my nose. It startles me each time and makes me laugh a little bit because although I am not being squirted in my eye, I am reminded of this scene in Cinderella, a movie that I watched over one million times as a child:

Each time the solution hits my face, I constantly see this scene! I exchanged my 30 day supply of contacts there that were an 8 strength and ordered a 7 strength and I’m waiting for them to arrive at my house. After my next SSI check, I will need to look into ordering contacts for me somewhere it is cheaper because a wise man once told me that money does not grow on trees and it does not come out of the machines in the wall like I asserted! That wiseman was my Dad.

Chewing has become increasingly difficult for me recently. Because of that, I drink both my breakfast and lunch in the form of Atkins shakes. Because I do this, it kind of makes me laugh and I think of the Slim Fast commercials from the 1980s but that is not why I do it.

My, “Sensible dinner” for the past three days has been Chorizo and eggs. My Mom makes flour tortillas to go with it. I haven’t eaten flour tortillas in years! But, carbs and calories don’t count for me between Christmas and New Year’s day anyway.

I sat in the kitchen with her as she made the tortillas and she handed me a warm tortilla with chorizo and eggs in it. I also have not had chorizo in years because it is pork meat and I don’t eat pork but I decided to get myself, “A pass” on this because I knew it would be easy to chew.

The first bite I took was just of tortilla which was warm and soft. The second bite I took, I tasted chorizo and closed to my eyes and saw a vivid memory that I have stored in my mind. I think of this memory with extreme fondness.

I had a half day of school and wore some reason, my Dad picked me up. Because it was the middle of the day, we most likely would go out to lunch together. However, it was the,”Family Planning” week in my Morality class at school. Before we received our ranks as our newborn children, the girls had to be “Pregnant” so I had a book bag filled up with magazines strap to the front of me under my school shirt.

My Dad laughed when I came out of school and commented on how I had the, “Pregnant waddle” down quite well. I told him it was because the book back was hanging too low and the magazines were weighing it down so it forced me to waddle. I told my Dad that we get extra points in my class if I wear my belly out in public. My Mom made me take it off when I was in public with her but my Dad didn’t mind so much.

I clearly remember struggling to get out of my Dad’s truck in the parking lot in the back of the restaurant and walking with him on the side street to get into the restaurant door at the front of the building. As we were about halfway to the front door, my Dad looked over at me and nonchalantly told me that, “If we see anyone we know, I don’t know you!” I vividly remember us both laughing as we walked into the restaurant. We went to El Rancho And I had chorizo and eggs.

I don’t know how much chorizo is left but I’m cool with having it again tonight given how easy it is for me to chew and I like revisiting this memory. I can still hear my Dad’s laugh and that makes me happy.

I was this old with my pregnant belly and this is my school uniform which I was wearing when I went to eat with my Dad. I never would have thought that In just one year, I would ACTUALLY be pregnant!:

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Thanking about this today, I decided to NOT put ornaments on my tree this year. Leia is just over a year old and LOVE my Christmas ornaments way too much! I am a super sentimental and each ornament on my tree has some significance to me!

My Mom tried to convince me to try it out but I told her that if Leia breaks any of my ornaments, I would have to hate her and I don’t want to do that because I love her so much! Leia likes looking at the window and my tree is a little further away from the wall so she can get in there too look out the window. I think it was a couple weeks ago when this happened:

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She had just come back from our walk and still had her leash on and something happened where she bolted to the window and I thought for a moment she was going to knock me over. I was grateful that the star was just knocked out of balance which Sean straightened out on Christmas.

I have seen so many people posting pictures of their trees and zooming in on specific ornaments and I missed not being able to do that this year but I did get a few ornaments that I will just post here anyway even though it’s two days after Christmas. My brother tagged me in a post on Facebook of a Cookie Monster tree because that’s my character. I absolutely love Cookie and yes, those of us who KNOW him, are on first name basis! I thought it was funny because I just had received this ornament in the mail:

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I did get a few other ornaments addition to Cookie, Hallmark had this one and I remember searching for and buying this toy for Sean when he was young and really into Toy Story. I recently found the toy and it is still in good condition because I put it away nicely:

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Just after my tree was put up, I found this one which goes to show my forethought when I ordered pictures from Sean’s graduation in August:

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I also got this one because now I DO have a graduate:

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I did order a couple ornaments from my friends 31 party to further commemorate Sean‘s graduation because it was a crazy 2020 graduation and one that I was not able to attend:

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And Leia was his graduation present! I didn’t get to put my favorite ornament on the tree I bought this year The Sean had to drive and get for me but there’s always next year!:

I shed my 8th Covid tears on Christmas Eve and my 9th were on Christmas Day. I did not see Sean on Christmas Eve which was so different from what our Christmases have been for the past 19 years.

The whole Christmas season was so strange for me that I think it kind of calminated over the past two days and resulted in my tears. Normally, the traditionally started with Sean when he was 11 or 12 and we lived in our house. I told him one Christmas Eve as we got home from my Mom’s family’s hall party that if he stays awake long enough on Christmas Eve, Santa will come and it is technically Christmas Day so we could open presents then. Sean would go to his room and read a book or something while I got the presents ready.

I did that because I did not want to sleep in my contacts (like I always did because I broke my glasses years ago) and I didn’t want to wake up early in the morning as my disease was setting in unbeknownst to me.

Sean would open his presents and we would leave all of the wrapping paper and boxes in the living room and go to sleep. We then would wake up on Christmas morning, put all the wrapping paper in a garbage bag, and I would save the boxes (because my Mama didn’t raise no fool) and we would go see a movie before we went to eat dinner at my Mom’s house.

This picture predates those Christmas memories and it is from our second apartment’s Christmas. We had three Christmases there before I bought our house but finding this picture just in time for throwback Thursday:

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really made me miss him on Christmas Eve! I cried about that because we would not be staying up past midnight to open his presents and things were so different now! Because of my tears, my Mom set this up on my desk beneath the TV to make me feel better:

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I did not see Sean until the evening of Christmas day and it was NOT normal. He sat on the loveseat as I sat on the other end of the room in the doorway to the hallway. We all were masked up and he appreciated everything he got. He told me that he wanted to give me a hug after each present but that’s just not how things are right now.

I cried at the vast differences on Christmas day too and will be happy when things return to normal. In the meantime, I have a book to read that Sean got me for Christmas!

I am haunted by the doctor who told me 20 years ago almost to the day that I am going to go blind and then I am going to die after she told me that I had MS.

I have heard that voice in my head quite clearly as I tried to make sense of my extremely strong prescription in the contacts that I just got. I couldn’t figure out why I was not able to see clearly! I was nervous and made a return appointment with a woman to adjust my contacts if necessary. Her name was Liz and she was lovely!

She had me try to see the letters on a computer screen similar to the eye chart in the doctor’s office hand to hand me red letters off of a card that I held in my hand. I had to hold little lenses in front of my eyes to see if I could see it better. I had visions of having to have a monocle to see and that made me really nervous.

She went into a drawer and got different lenses and told me to put them in instead of the contacts I was wearing. I definitely could see better immediately! She then told me that it is a lower prescription and that sometimes, stronger it’s not necessarily better!

My eyes have worsened from my contact prescription that I had from a year and a half ago but they’re a little bit better than the 8s I had in my last prescription. 7 is NOT great but I definitely will take it! I have to! I’m not blind… yet!:

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Continuing with the focus on things that people don’t realize I can no longer do. 

I miss, “Stand up” hugs and hearing someone’s heartbeat on the side of my face.

I completely forgot about this. It’s not even a Covid thing because I haven’t been able to do that in a long time anyway. Now, when I saw this, they were dancing and dancing is so far in my rearview I can’t even remember that. I can’t even remember the body control I used to have but seeing this was something so familiar I used to do all of the time because I am only 5 feet tall.

I’m this short to everyone. To guys anyway. Hmmm… Seeing this made me think of my past life, when I lived in the land of the “Able-bodied” and it’s coming in 20 years since I lived there.

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I vaguely remember someone’s chin on my head.