One Good Eye

Last night I had an experience I have feared since I started driving.  I am thankful that this has happened only once in all those 35 years, but it was just as unpleasant as I anticipated it would be.  I had left, shortly before dusk to make my rounds to the pond house, the post office, the grocery store and back home.  All went perfectly well.  I did not encounter a mob of unruly shoppers in Wal-Mart or anything that Black Friday would suggest I should.

By the time I left the store, with the items I'd needed, it was dark.  My driving vision is especially iffy at night and I prefer not to do it if I can avoid it.  But last night I thought nothing of it, put my groceries in the trunk, and pulled out to drive the 15 miles back home.  Most of the trip is spent on a four lane road, with just enough traffic to be annoying, but not subject to traffic jams.

About three miles into my journey it happened.  I'm guessing it was an eyelash that decided at that moment to end its life by dropping into my eye -- my ONE good eye!  It hurt.  I tried to "look around" it, but my eye was handling the problem its own way, watering, and trying to close.  The net result of my blinking and my eye's natural response was that I was, for all intents and purposes, BLIND, driving 55 miles per hour down a dark highway.  My right eye tried to pitch in, but its attempts were feeble, offering me a kind of "kaleidoscope on a trampoline" experience, which left me increasingly nauseated.

I did the best I could, pulling off the road and sitting there for a few minutes while my eye continued its magic healing method.  I tried to speed things along with a quick and sturdy eye rub, but that proved only to aggravate the situation.  No, this was something I needed to let Mother Nature handle.  And she did.  Within five minutes, I was pulling back onto the highway, my eye still sore, and the feeling that the "thing" was still in there, but my vision sufficiently returned.

I recall when I first attempted to get my driver's license in Virginia, having moved here from Florida in 1988. "Look in the box and read the letters in the box," the lady instructed me as she turned off the view through my left eye, leaving only my feeble right eye to obey her command.  "There are no letters, or, for that matter, a box," I assured her, presuming she had forgotten to flip the box-o-letters into the lighted screen...I DID see the lighted screen.  "YOU ARE BLIND IN YOUR RIGHT EYE" she announced to the world...well, the world inside that little trailer which was the DMV in those days.  There was much ado about her not wanting to issue me a driver's license.  I asked, "how do one-eyed people get a driver's license."  She informed me they needed an extra mirror...one on the right side door.  Well, I had that. But, I wondered, what would the extra mirror do for a person like me with no reasonable vision in my right eye?  Well, she could not answer that one...just knew it was the rule.  She begrudgingly issued my Virginia Operator's License.

I thought about that last night.  The extra side mirror did me absolutely no good when, in the dark, the eyelash fell.  I was also imagining the calls that would have soon been bringing the scanner to life, had I not pulled over immediately. "possible DUI, car all over the road..."  How many times I have heard that over the scanner, I cannot tell you, and I wonder now how many of those calls were about some pathetic one-eyed-woman with an eyelash in her eye!

Photo Taken in Poor Light Three Nights Ago....
Cannot Tell This Photo is of a Thermometer...
This is Similar to What I "saw" Last Night
with the Eyelash In my Eye