Specs, Panic!!! Dreams, and Plane Crashes, OH MY

[1monster]

I almost had my first panic attack ever yesterday.

I was subbing for an ESE teacher and had a free period. I was reading and thus not using my glasses... I think they were sitting on the top of my head.

The teacher's desk, while not untidy, was so filled up that just breathing in the wrong direction could make something fall off the desk. I noticed that a glass vase filled with silk roses was sitting very close to the edge of the desk, so I got up, walked around the desk and pushed it back some.

Then I went to put on my glasses before sitting back down. No glasses on the top of my head. I assumed I had placed them on the desk.

No glasses on the desk.

They must have fallen on the floor. My eyesight, without glasses, is not good. So I got down on the floor and patted around while I searched.

Still no glasses.

I lifted everything on the desk... perhaps I had placed something on them.

No glasses.

I opened the desk drawers to check even though I hadn't opened the drawers prior to this.

Of course, no glasses.

Checked the garbage can ... three times.

Checked my lunch box. (Why they would be in my lunch box, I can't say, but I was getting a bit worried at this point.)

Bent over knocking my forehead against the chalk tray on the white board to look behind the bookcase.

No glasses.

I checked my book bag AND the computer case the teacher left unzipped on the floor behind the desk (several times for both).

No glasses.

Sweating a bit now, I called DH and told him to go to the cupboard above the sink and take all of the glasses cases out and bring them to me at school. I wasn't sure that DH would be able to pick out the right pair of glasses...

(I have five glasses cases in that cupboard. Two are new frames that don't have prescription lenses in them yet. One pair is the right shape... nearly like the ones I wear now, but they are a dark pink and not quite me. Another pair are tortoiseshell aviators. I love the color and they are okay, but just off a bit... Then there are two old broken pairs. One where the frame spit into two at the bridge. The other pair was the last pair of glasses with real glass lenses that I had. Got into the car one evening to go somewhere and I heard a ping. The glass lens broke right down the middle. That is the second time that I have had a glass lens break while I was wearing the glasses. The first time was in 1975 when I worked at (redacted) Lab for the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences -- what a mouthful that is.

Anyway, there was a lab tech named Steve (he looked like a marble carving of the Greek God Apollo and had a sweet personality) and an intern from Brown University, who had one more semester to go before graduating with a BS in marine biology... He decided that the life of a marine biologist was just too damned isolated and lonely. The last I heard, years ago, he was a manager at a Miami department store.

I was in one of the labs doing protein assays on some fish livers and kidneys when Steve came in rather upset. He said that he had a dream the night before of a terrible plane crash... and that Margaret, our boss, was flying down to Miami the next day for a conference. He asked me if I thought he should tell her.

I answered that it was probably just a bad dream and that I had a bad one myself the night before. "I dreamed that my glasses just shattered," and that he shouldn't worry Margaret with it. He said that Barry also thought the same.

So Steve and Barry went off to what was then the science library and I continued working on my assays.

I heard a strange grinding sound and my vision was suddenly somewhat obscured. I thought that I'd maybe splashed some the chemicals on to my glasses and took them off to clean them.

Only to find that one of the lenses had broken and the only thing holding it together was the wire frame.

I took off for the Science library... "Steve!" Steve, Barry, and I agreed that Steve should tell Margaret about his dream of the plane crash, and mine of the broken glasses.

Margaret canceled her flight to Miami and drove down that night.

There was no plane crash the next day or any time close to that date.

But who knows what might have happened if Margaret had been on that plane? ;:o?)

The final pair of glasses are a pair I never used. One evening several years ago, I got a sudden excruciating headache and a piercing pain in my left eye. When the headache and eye pain finally passed, I noticed that my vision was considerably worse than it was before the headache. Especially in the left eye. It was also during a cold gray weather period.

That scared me enough to make an immediate visit to an ophthalmologist for the most complete eye exam I have ever had. He found nothing wrong, but gave me a new lens Rx.

I had it filled, but the specs were not right. They had ground out coke bottle lenses that were way too thick for the partially wire frames. The lenses kept falling out. I had those glasses back for fixing about six times. By the time they had them wearable, my eyes had changed back to what they were before the headache, and the lenses were too strong for me to wear comfortably on a regular basis, but were okay for an emergency spare pair.

Then I went into the next classroom and borrowed a student to help me look for my glasses. She looked for the next eight or so minutes with no luck. They seemed to have disintegrated into molecular particals or have been abducted by little green aliens...

Even thought I had another pair of glasses coming, I was more than a little upset by this point.

The bell rang and my class came in. Those kids started looking for the missing specs, also with no luck UNTIL...

One young man asked, "Are those your glasses there, in the flower vase?"

Sure enough, there were my glasses in the vase with the silk roses.

Apparently, when I moved the vase, the glasses fell, unnoticed by me, from my head into the flower vase.

I called DH to cancel the run down to the school with my spares (I'm now carrying them with me despite their fragility) and carried on with teaching my class...

I never really realize how helpless I can be until I don't have my specs... \O-j-O\