Doctor my eyes

Michael got a put in his mouth last week to correct a crossbite he has. He's not too happy about the orthodontics, but ithttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif's only for 6-9 months, and hopefully, this will go a long way for him not needing braces later. Basically, the palatal expander gradually expands his upper jaw. The device comes with a key (it looks like a lock pick attached to a plastic tongue depressor) that, when inserted into the expander, turns a wheel (almost an axle) that widens the expander ever so slightly. We are supposed make to turns a day in his mouth.

But this post isn't about Michael's teeth. It's about mine and Lori's eyes.

On the first night we supposed to use the key, we encountered some difficulty. Lori saw how to do it at the orthodontist, even turning it once. But at home, she couldn't duplicate the success. Neither could eye. Even after shining a light into Michael's mouth, we couldn't tell if we were turning the wheel or not. We knew we did it once, so we decided to wait until the next day to try again.

Unfortunately, we didn't have any better luck the next day. Our problem was getting the key into the hole to turn the wheel. It was so small that we couldn't tell if we were successful or not. After a few frustrating minutes for all three of us (Michael was a trooper through this, but he reached his limit), I came up with the unlikely solution: I took my contact lenses out.

I am near-sighted, with about 20/100 vision. Lori is near-sighted as well. Both of us wear contact lenses or glasses to see. At my first visit to the optometrist after I turned 40, I asked him if there was anything I should be looking (no pun intended) out for. He said gradually, my close-up vision would start declining and I might eventually need reading glasses. I'm nowhere near that point yet, but in the months following, I began to notice that when I was wearing my corrective lenses, reading or viewing small things at very close range had become trickier. I also noticed that if I was reading in bed or using my smart phone, I could do so better without my glasses on.

Essentially, we were having so much trouble expanding the expander because we couldn't see it. When I took my contact lenses out and left my glasses off, I could see inside Michael's mouth much more clearly. In fact, I now completely understood what Lori was trying to explain to me when describing the expander. Five seconds later, I had turned the wheel once (we only turned it once, worried we had turned it once already and not realized) and was done.

I'm not giving up my contact lenses anytime soon, and standard reading glasses are too powerful for our relatively youthful eyes. So occasionally, I'm going to be squinting at things close up. At least now, when I know when the situation is really important, I know the solution is as easy as removing any lenses from my eyes.

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