Storytime: Offsetting fears

My dad is a photographer, and growing up I had a dim understanding that our family livelihood depended on his vision. And I was a conscientious kid so I listened when he gave advice about eyes: wear the safety goggles and turn the light on when you read. Risks as diverse as thrown pencils and drain opener splashback were taken seriously. From 3rd grade onward I wore glasses for distance vision—I still remember seeing clearly the Pearle Vision sign at the mall when I got my first pair—and as an introverted nerd it was pretty easy to avoid major risks. As a teenager I started some activities in which glasses were annoying. Cross country running and small boat sailing were severe tests for glasses slippage and fogging. I occasionally wore contacts but they weren’t a perfect solution…and they also evoked Dad’s warnings of repeated eye pokes and possible infection. All in all, I worried about my eyes and vision about as much as a kid reasonably can.

But as an adult I ignored his longstanding and clearly expressed fear of laser eye surgery and got LASIK. The reason for this was two frights that occurred a decade apart.

The first was an unseen spider. In my mid teens I took a midnight walk from bed to bathroom, leaving glasses behind. And midway through that walk I passed through a doorway and felt a tap, exactly as though a friend had made the Orthodox sign of the cross and struck my left collarbone with those three bunched fingers. The mechanism of this particular blessing was, however, a spider the size of my palm. When I glanced down at my left shoulder it was horribly close and in focus—thanks, nearsightedness!—but when I swiped it away it disappeared into the darkness and out of my range of sight. This was…unsettling.

The second was helplessness in a foreign land. Some ten years later I visited Pisa with my girlfriend, glasses and prescription sunglasses in my backpack. After a day of sightseeing in the sun, I went to switch back to glasses and could not find them. To this day I don’t know how I lost them. But at this point it was night, I had to return a rental car and get on a flight, and I realized then that I had no good options beyond asking her to do everything for me. This was less shocking than the spider, but it was also unsettling to realize just how easily I could be made completely helpless.

Some years later, those two experiences were in my mind as I paid thousands of dollars to have someone cut flaps in my corneas and reshape them with a laser. The major downside of not wearing glasses since then has been a renewed fear of cooking bacon in a pan. Back in my spectacled days I had more than one instance of grease hitting my lenses and now my eyes always feel very exposed when I’m standing at the stove.

I have no regrets, but as I’m in my mid 40s my close vision is on the way out, so I’ll be fitting myself for glasses again shortly. I don’t think there’s a lesson here, but it’s strange to think of how decisions like this ultimately get made.

P.S. I now know my dad and James Gunn are kindred spirits in the fear-of-eye-trauma department