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!:
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:
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:
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!
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:
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:
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:
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:
I also got this one because now I DO have a graduate:
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:
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!:
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!:
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.
My Mom and I have been listening to the soundtrack while we complete our routine for a while. I remember just after I bought our house, I ended up teaching a short story from the literature books we had.
It was a terrible story about towns people gathering together on the same day every year and stoning whomever chose the paper with the black dot on it. The reason they did this was because it was tradition. they had no further explanation than that. Thinking about this fact, I showed my kids this clip from the movie, Fiddler on the Roof:
I showed my kids this song clip because there was no explanation for traditions they had. I also remember that I gave them all a fortune cookie and told them that that is a family tradition of mine. When I was young, we always used to go to a Cantonese restaurant as a family that has since closed and we would ceremoniously open our fortune cookies on the way home.
While I was previewing the clip to show my students, I just watched the rest of the movie. I remember growing up with this movie and watching it with my cousinTs and we would laugh at Tevye dancing during this song:
So, when I watched this movie about 10 years ago, Sean came out of his room and saw that I was crying. He asked me why I was crying and I told him because it is a sad movie and then he asked why I was watching it and I told him, “Because I love it“
So, my Mom and I watched it the other day and of course I cried again and I can’t believe I used to watch this movie with my cousinTs when I was young! We didn’t know what was going on. But now, as an adult and a mother I know! I paid attention to the songs that I never really paid attention to before:
And the most heart- wrenching:
So, of course I cried A LOT both times since we watched it twice.
I am thinking that I will climb out of this 3eB rabbit hole soon but in the meantime, listening to this tune reminds me of the ONE time I rode on the back of a motorcycle.
Maybe it was because I was two months pregnant and no one knew except for me and my boyfriend. I was so afraid that I squeezed this guy’s (Sean’s godfather) waist so hard that at a stop sign, he told me that he can’t breathe so that I would have to let go a little bit. I opened my mouth to scream but all that I could do was scream in as I gasped for breath.
Ah, youth. Back when cigarette ash in my eyes would not bother me! But this tune goes back a little further for me, I remember being I n the high school rewinding this CD as it played in my car so this line played over and over:
I can’t even remember what I was referring to but I like hearing this tune anyway because it reminds me of a simpler life; one that I can’t easily recall now but music helps!:
I remember my first job at the athletic clothing store, “Superstars” in the mall. My manager’s name was Chandler and we were alone in the store one weekend morning and he was in the back and I was seated at the cash register. I sneezed just as he opened the door from the back.
We were still alone in the store and he walked up to the cash register and looked at me incredulously. He asked me if it was me who just sneezed. when I told him that it was, he told me that I sounded like a 90-year-old Italian woman. I laughed and told him that it was just me in the store.
I sneeze pretty loudly and blow my nose just as loudly! It’s definitely NOT lady like but I always remember him saying that about me being old Italian woman.
Well, Leia has been living in my house for nine months now. I had yet to hear her sneeze. That is until yesterday. It was a little baby sneeze. But what can I expect from a dog who is about 36 pounds?! Of course she would have a baby sneeze! It was super cute but I think most things she does is super cute anyway. Except when she needs a bath because then I just call her, “Stinky girl.”
It has been established since right after we got Leia that she is not allowed in my bedroom. That was established very shortly after we got her and after two or three accidents that she had IN MY ROOM as she was getting used to the house and us. I do NOT forget so she’s NOT allowed in my room!
So, last night, (actually pretty early this morning) as my Mom helped to get me into bed, Leia stood in my doorway. It’s pretty involved transferring me out of my wheelchair given that my Mom and I are the same height. We have figured out how to do this and it just takes a few steps.
My Mom told Leia to, “Sit” as she was getting me out of my wheelchair. As we were making the necessary adjustments, we heard the click of Leia’s feet on my hardwood floor and when my Mom turned her head, she was just in time to see Leia sit upright.
What we have noticed, is that when Leia is told to, “Sit” and she really doesn’t want to, she inches her butt forward. The clicking was her front paws.
My Mom and I stopped to look at Leia and laughed because she had inched forward about a foot into my room. We laughed when we saw her and My Mon said that Leia likes to play, “Mother, May I?” I laughed as my Mom finished getting me into bed and she took Leia out of my room.
Having had MS for just over 20 years now, I am no stranger to, “Can’t”s. Over the past two decades, I have seen many abilities diminish or be completely gone. A lot of these are very slow progressing so I’ve had time to deal with and process them. I’ve taken these, “Can’t”s in stride because there is no other way to handle it.
It has been almost three years since I taught in the classroom. I’ve had almost three years to process the fact that I am no longer teaching in the classroom but it is definitely NOT easy. I miss my ability to teach every day.
When I wake up in the morning, I’ll check my phone as I call my Mom to tell her that I am awake so she can help me to get out of bed. I will check any texts I have missed throughout the night and my emails as well. Checking my email this morning startled me. I read this email as soon as I opened my eyes:
The email told me that my teaching certificate will expire in 177 days. I have been a certified teacher since the spring of 2005.
And in 177 days, I will no longer be a certified teacher. Reading this email made me catch my breath and it was a little startling.
I haven’t been in the classroom for almost 3 years but this kind of hurt! I am no longer in the classroom because MS has decided to take that ability away from me as well. I always thought I would retire from teaching about 30 years from now. Instead, I was forced to stop teaching almost 3 years ago. My certificate expires on July 1, 2021
There is no point to renewing my certificate because I am no longer able to teach. This morning, I was startled and I will say that this, “Can’t” hurts a little bit more because if I could, I still would.
