The eyes have it . . .

Last weekend I had quite a scare. We were at my Dad's Friday night playing Scrabble. I kept noticing this big black gnat dancing around Dad's face every time I looked at him. Swatted it a couple times only to find that it just kept moving wherever I happened to look. Ah! That was no gnat! It was a floater! I've always had eye floaters, though most of the time I'm completely oblivious to them. But this one was dark black and predominate. And bugging the snot out of me.

By the time we got home, I noticed the "gnat" now had a new little friend. It looked like a very black, inky version of those twisty-tabs that are on loaves of bread. This one was curled around a bit like a paper-clip, only not. It too danced around my vision. I realized at that point that both of these were in my right eye, and I started to get concerned.

I took a shower and noticed the gnat and the twisty tab had been joined by shooting stars of light. Okay, now I was REALLY concerned. The stars darted back and forth across my vision in wide arcs, and were then accompanied by huge flashing arcs in my far-right periphery. Like a giant right-hand parenthesis mark imitating a bolt of lightning. Persistent, flashing and starting to give me a headache.

I went online to read about floaters and got scared. Really scared. Everything I read indicated the possibility of my retina detaching. "See a physician immediately." Oh. My. Gosh. I have often said - take my hearing, take my taste buds, take my sense of smell or even my vocal chords, but PLEASE GOD don't ever take my eyesight. Fear took root in my gut and I started imagining the worst. Like never being able to read again, unless my hands moved across lines of tiny bumps on a page written in Braille . . .

My earthly rock, otherwise known as my beloved husband, suggested I go to bed and see how it was in the morning. Through the night the shooting starts and lightning bolts kept flashing whenever I awoke. But of course it was The Weekend. And where do you find emergency opthamology care? I wasn't about to go to the ER after my recent root canal nightmare in Dallas. But I kept worrying about it. Finally, at the insistence of my dad and sister, I got the name of an opthamologist who had an emergency service. In less than 20 minutes he called me back and completely put my mind at rest, assuring me it could wait until I could see him on Monday.

Monday afternoon, Dr. Felch spotted several lesions, what he called tiny pieces of the eye's gel-like vitreous that had broken loose inside the inner back portion of my eye. But the retina was intact and my vision was still perfect. He said the floaters would eventually fade away, and unless I lost field of vision or had what appeared to look like a curtain rising that blocked my vision, I should be okay. "We'll keep an eye on it," he quipped.

So, while I'm greatly relieved it's nothing more serious, I'm still annoyed by this new mass of floaters running amok of the old mass of floaters, like so many black taxis colliding at rush hour in Times Square . . . And when I read, it's as if there's a big fat fingerprint smeared on my glasses. Only there's not.

But I'm trying to keep my whining down and my humor high. After all, as I told some writer friends, at least I'm not having to shop for a stylin' eye-patch to rock the pirate in me . . . And we're not having to train Darby to be my seeing-eye pooch. Which is good, since she thinks leashes and harnesses are highly insulting.

The experience sure made me do some serious thinking. About the precious gift of sight. About the joy of reading and all the books I still want to devour. About the faces I love. About the beauty of the world that I so often take for granted - the spectacular colors of spring, the serenity of a sunset on a beach, the snow-covered mountains in winter, the innocence of a baby's smile . . .

So I'll ask you. What would you miss most if you lost your sight?

FYI: if you tell me reality TV, I'll have to ask you to unsubscribe from my blog. Just sayin' . . .