Swept out to sea.

I'm having a very peculiar time with my glasses this summer.

A month ago, we went to Ohio for a week. The first morning we were there, I got up, went to the kitchen for breakfast, took off my glasses at the sink to polish them, and the frame snapped right in my hand. Snapped in the round eyehole part, so no way to fix them. Talk about panic! I sat around blind till lunchtime when the Wal-Mart vision center opened, we went in, and miracle of miracles, they still had the frames in stock at that store, 18-20 months after I bought my glasses at the Wal-Mart at home. $40 later and I was good to go, they just popped my lenses into the new frames. SUCH a relief! I usually have to wait at least a week for new glasses, with my prescription and the extra frills like featherweight lenses; I still can't believe they had my frames right there. Thank God for Wal-Mart, and I never thought I'd say that! I honestly feared I was going to have to be blind for my entire week's vacation.

Because I am blind without them. I can make out blurs, that's about it.

So we went to the beach last night and the tide was coming in and the waves were high. I was standing in the shallows getting pounded with piles of sand, which hurt, so Todd told me to come out further past where the waves break. He was hanging onto me because I can't swim, and we would sort of jump and float as the waves came in. We've done this plenty of times before, but this time the waves were a little bigger, and a huge one came in, broke over us, knocked me loose and sent me crashing.

And it swept my glasses right off my head.

If you've ever dropped anything in the ocean, you know what your odds are of finding it again! So I was totally blind, coughing up seawater, and now I have NO glasses.

The whole long drive home we tried to think of what we could do, because I knew it would take days, at least, to get new glasses. The last time I got glasses I took my Rx to Lenscrafters, and even the "new glasses in an hour" people told me it would take more than a week to get the glasses in.

And I was sure I'd thrown out whatever old pairs may have been lurking about, when we moved. I always purge drawers and toss out old stuff when we move. I had this vision of myself sitting in a chair staring blearily into space for who knows how long.

We got home and I felt my way straight to the tub to wash off the sand...I'd really forgotten about even the possibility of old glasses in the junk drawer. And in came Todd with not one, but two pairs of old glasses!

One was a pair I'd gotten four years ago and stopped wearing early on because the shape of the lenses distorted everything too much. But who cares about distortion when the alternative is blindness? So that's what I'm wearing now. They're giving me a little headache, but I am just so, so thankful I held onto them. So grateful to be able to see!

I'm off to Pearle Vision this afternoon for an exam and new glasses--hopefully they can get them in soon. (Sadly, Wal-Mart isn't covered under our new insurance...this is one case where I would gladly keep going to Wal-Mart!) But I've definitely learned that it pays to have a back-up pair. I've worn glasses for more than 30 years, but I've never needed back-ups twice in one month before!