Reconstructing Rick

I can’t pinpoint the exact date my eyes started going out on me but I know that it was early in life. Each day that went by my focus was more blurred and my perspective changed. It made me feel weaker and fragile and very vulnerable. To compensate I would try things like squinting but that only goes so far. Eventually, I gave up trying to live like I could see things correctly and bumping into things all the time and decided to go to an eye doctor.

I hate doctors for the most part. Of course, each time I go I’m sick so my experience of getting healthy always starts when I tried to heal myself and still ended up just as sick or worse and that’s when I finally went. For me to go to the doctor means first I must admit that time didn’t make it better and all the stuff I tried failed too.

So I went to the eye doctor and explained that I have a problem with my vision and he does a couple tests I really didn’t understand like the puff in the eyes crap. Hate that. He says it’s to check against the pressure in my eyes but I think it’s to test to see if I can see with a strong wind. Yah, I’m weird that way.

Then he has me sit down and he puts this contraption in from of my face and has me look thru tiny holes. He asks me to read what I can see. I tell him I see the E in front of me. Of course I can, it’s like 2 feet tall and I saw it when I came in the room. I can lie with the best of them.  He asks me to read the next line which I can make out a lot of it but not all of it. He then flips a couple things and some lens come up and asks again. I can read a little more. With each step he goes through I can see more and more clearly until he asks me to read the last line.

“Better or worse?” he asks, “one or two?”. He keeps flipping the lens till I tell him. Eventually I can read pretty much all the last line. He writes a script and I get some contacts a little later.

Even with my eye sight improved I still don’t see things as clearly as others at times. Some people ask me if I saw this or that and sometimes I dont. Still, I’m amazed at how much I can see and how stupid I was for not doing this sooner.

To me, the 12 Steps of Na is like the lens improving my vision. The doctor… well he is the meetings and the groups helping me and asking me what I see with each change. My poor eyesight? We’ll makes no difference I guess if I was born with bad vision or something I did to make it worse. The fact is I’m doing something about it. I am almost blind without the correction. I simply cannot enjoy life as others do without seeing life like others do!

I know people who know me in my past will always wonder if I have my contacts in and if I am seeing things like they do. I also know that the prescription he gave me to see clearly at the time was based on my sight at that moment. It will get worse and I will have to go through the steps all over again.

I could have the surgury to repair my sight once and for all. In NA, this is called death because there is no permanent fix. I will always need NA. I will always welcome the people in the group who finally gave given up being blind. Hopefully as my life a goes on, I will be able to share with you what I see today. Sometimes for the first time. Sometimes with a new prespective on life.

I know all it will take is one action to take me back to the moment where I could not see. I could remove the contacts and what is worse is I will KNOW what it is like to see clearly again and now can’t see at all. That is worse.

Oh, the last line on the exam chart reads, “We do recover”. Glad I see that today.