I have always had terrible vision. As a child, I wore glasses (and braces and corrective shoes — wildly popular, I was).
Years later, I saved up and got contacts. Talk about a whole new world! Who knew the leaves on our poplar trees were green on one side and silver on the other?
About 10 years ago, after decades with contacts, I went to the ophthalmologist with blurred vision.
What had happened was that I made Widdle get out of the shower to wrangle a large dead cockroach on the kitchen floor, which turned out to be two raisins stuck together. (I eat raisins by the fistful daily and, to Widdle’s dismay, drop them all over the house.)
Anyway, I figured it was just time for new contacts. Then the eye guy looked into my orb and let out a low whistle.
“Huh,” he said. “Well, you’re kinda young for this, but you have pretty advanced cataracts.”
(I have heard this all my life: “Well, you’re kinda young for this, but you have bad knees/kidney issues/crazy hormones.” One day, I fully expect to hear, “Ms. Smith, you’re kinda young for this, but you’re dead.”)
So, at age 52, I had cataract surgery, and it was a breeze — nothing to it. Three weeks later, after the second eye healed, I could squint and see a housefly on a door knocker 50 yards away. One minor complication: Things started going fuzzy again in a few months — some kind of benign haze, a common side effect. I sat down in his office for about five minutes, and he zapped both eyes with some laser beam. That was that.
I haven’t seen him since. As in, I don’t need to; my vision is pretty darn perfect.
Still, after years of fumbling through life, I can relate to this kind-hearted lady in England who tried to rescue an orphan hedgehog.
Per The Daily Mail, the elderly woman found a tiny hedgehog on the roadside, carried it home and put it in a newspaper-lined box with water and cat food. She kept her distance, but the next morning, when it hadn’t eaten or even moved, she rushed it to the nearest wildlife vet.
“It was the first admission of the day. The lady came in with a box. She said she had found this baby hedgehog on the pavement; it was cold, and she picked it up,” wildlife hospital manager Janet Kotze recalled.
“I opened the box and thought: ‘It’s definitely not a hedgehog.’”
It was a furry, spiky pom-pom from atop a girl’s toboggan.
Kotze put the ball back in the box and gently informed the woman: “It’s actually a bobble of a bobble hat.’” (We say pom-pom, they say bobble, apparently.)
The animal lover was very embarrassed. “Are you joking?” she asked, which is exactly what I would have said, only with my North Carolina twang: “Ah yew jokin’?”
Hospital employees said the woman was very sweet, very concerned and very mortified. She took the box and scurried off.
“Bless her, her heart was in the right place,” Kotze said. “I don’t think she’ll make the same mistake again; I think she’ll check next time.”
What do you think? After this, if that lady wrecked her car on a hog in the road, she’d drive on, saying, “Nope, nope, won’t get fooled again.”
I see her hedgehog and raise her two raisins.
