I drove 20 miles to Costco and spent the rest of the afternoon at the Kaiser medical center in Davis.
Oh--it's not as bad as it sounds.
You might remember a few months ago when I got lost in Vallejo trying to find the freeway in the dark after leaving Costco. Today I took the wrong off-ramp and got turned around, in the daylight this time. At one point I was stopped at a long stoplight, took my glasses off to clean them, and the nosepiece snapped in two.
You need to know that the only reason I can find my glasses in the morning is that I put them in the same place each night. It's the ONLY bit of my life which is organized because I am blind as a bat without my glasses. Here I was at a busy intersection with glasses that were broken, 20 miles from home, and lost in Vallejo again.
I was trying to drive around Vallejo, one-handed, holding my glasses together over my nose.
I finally decided I could see cars, just not signs, so I took them off completely, figuring that two handed semi-blind driving was safer than one-handed driving. When I wasn't finding Costco, I decided I really needed my glasses so went to put them on again, but one half of them slipped out of my hand and I couldn't find the lens. I wore only one lens, fortunately the one for my "good eye."
I remembered that Costco has an optical department, if only I could get there. I finally got to Costco, miraculously, and tried to grope around to find the missing lens, which I finally did, on the floor of the back seat.
I stumbled into Costco's optometry counter crying "help!" feebly. Of course they had nothing there to help me, but they did have scotch tape and so they taped the glasses together. They didn't fit on my head right and because they didn't set right, my vision correction wasn't quite right, but at least I could see.
(I was also quite a fetching image.) I managed to do $200 worth of shopping, even half blind, and loaded it all in the car, putting the glasses on the front seat because the tape was starting to come apart and the glasses slipped off my nose every time I bent over to pick something up.
I drove directly from Costco to Kaiser, hoping that all the frozen foods and meat would not spoil in the car while I went in to see about my glasses. In the Ophthalmology department, they found out that I am 6 months overdue for an eye exam and they could fit me in two hours from then so I made an appointment.
On my way back to the car to drive home, look for my old glasses and unload the food, I noticed that there was nobody in the lab area and so I decided to pop in for a mammogram, this being October, which is mammogram month, of course. You have very odd conversations when strangers are manhandling your breast tissue like you would knead bread dough.
I drove home, unloaded (most of) the groceries from Costco--at least those which needed to be refrigerated or frozen -- and then got back into the car again to go back to Kaiser for my eye appointment.
The doctor discovered I needed a diabetic retinopathy check too, so he did that, I ordered 2 pairs of glasses (for the first time in my life getting prescription sunglasses, since they can't do transition lenses on my prescription), and came home to collapse.
Fortunately, I have my old glasses, so at least I have something to wear while I'm waiting for my new glasses!
(note the red on the bridge of my nose, which is what you get from wearing glasses held together with scotch tape all day!)
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