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The drama queen in me has taken a backseat and I'm getting used to the idea of wearing glasses. (I'm not saying I like it. Just that I'm getting used to it.)

Rewind: I knew there was something wrong with my vision. Things seemed blurry and I couldn't read signs the way I used to. I figured it would pass; every time something seemed unclear, I would tell myself I was just having a bad day and the fog would clear eventually. And then I realized that I had been telling myself this for months.

So I finally set aside time to see H's ophtha-bro, David. The assistant ran some tests and declared, "200 ka ata!" I figured she had made a mistake--I knew my eyesight wasn't perfect, but it couldn't be that bad.

She ran another test on me, which I considered a mild form of torture--for six minutes, I had to sit in front of this machine, with my right eye focused on a tiny black dot. I was given a clicker; each time I'd see something flicker around the dot, I'd have to click. And then I had to do it all over again with the other eye. Those were the longest 12 minutes of my life. (H took the same test before--and back then it was 20 minutes for each eye! I wouldn't have been able to handle that. Six minutes and my eye was begging for rest.)

Then David had me sit in front of one of those letter charts. He handed me a pair of glasses and asked me to read the bottom line. My vision was perfect. He laughed, saying, "Isn't it much clearer?" I wondered what he meant. I took the glasses off and saw that the letters were all a blur.

200. How did it get so bad so fast?

"You're amazing!" he said, considering I had lasted this long without glasses. "I kinda had a hard time reading billboards," I confessed. "Uh, billboards are pretty big!" he pointed out. "And you drive right?" he asked. "Nope," I replied. (Well OK, I sort of do, but I haven't in over a year.) To which he said, "Thank God!" (Finally, an excuse not to drive! Plus I can finally explain why I can't catch the disc sometimes while playing ultimate. Haha.)

That wasn't the worst part. David examined my eyes and muttered "Yikes." Not the kind of thing you'd wanna hear from any doctor. "What's wrong?" I asked, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. Apparently, I'm at a high risk of getting glaucoma. "What's the percentage of people who are high risk?" I asked, telling myself that a good number of the population must fall into the category. "Maybe ten percent," he replied. Crap. He reassured me by saying that only about 10% of that would go blind.

Very comforting.

He explained that it wasn't because of anything I did, but because of the very structure of my eye. I asked what could be done. I found out all I could do was go back for regular checkups from then on, for monitoring purposes.

I left the office with my prescription and news that I totally wasn't expecting to hear. As the day progressed, I kept getting sadder and sadder. I kept thinking about the implications. I hate when I'm not good at something, and having far from perfect vision pretty much falls under that category. Later on, it dawned on me that it wasn't about missing sunsets and all those things. I just couldn't bear the thought of not seeing H, or our kids' faces, or our grandkids'. Of not being able to read a normal book or to learn a dance.

And then I found out that H is high risk too! He told me not to worry, that we're in good hands. Thankfully, David's a glaucoma specialist.

I eventually snapped out of it and decided to focus on what had to be done. Over the weekend, I found me a pair of glasses that I could live with. Glasses: a symbol of my own imperfection; a reminder that life is short and uncertain, and that I should drink in as much as I could. We all should, while we still can.