Taking things for granted

Sometimes, first thing in the morning, I wake up and make my list of things I'm grateful for and want to keep close during the day.

Things like kids that are healthy, a safe place to live, great friends, feeling loved. All important and all good things to focus on when you have less wonderful things to come in your day. It feels like a protective blanket in which I wrap myself.

These past few weeks, I've been lucky enough to see my friend (and physician) Rebecca a number of times. On one trip, she listened when I told her my vision has been blurry lately - I thought it was just allergies, which are terrible at the moment. She put drops in my eyes and retrieved an opthomology scope.

It seems I got my grandfather's eyes.

Grampa Don lost his vision when he was in his late 60s. Macular degeneration is a genetic disorder where your vision slowly goes away, beginning with a little bit at the center of your line of sight and expanding out until you feel like there's a big, fuzzy black spot that blocks things when you look straight at them. At least that's how he described it to me. I think it has something to do with nerve damage. Grampa was legally blind when he died at 88. I have been a very good girl and take special vitamins every day to combat this (go licopene!) so I wouldn't wake up one day in my 60s and realize my sight was going.

Nope, it had to happen in my 40s.

I am a visual person. I work in advertising where everything I do is reliant on my sight. I have years of experience running a printing shop where I could catch the most subtle color shift and tell pressmen how to fix it to get a color built perfectly in CMYK. I spend my days on blogger, facebook and emailing the people I love that aren't right next to me.

What happens if one day I wake up and I can't see?

I'm lucky. The opthamologist says the degeneration is less than 1-1/2 percent (minimal) and I will most likely be able to slow the process doing eye exercises, enlarging the type on my computer and wearing a new prescription. I'm lucky. But now, I see this spot of fuzzy gray that clouds the center of my vision in my left eye. I will always see it. They can't fix it nor can they promise it won't get worse as I get older.

My blog friend whitemist has been a source of comfort and inspiration on many a difficult day. He lost his sight and has hope that it will come back. I am not, by any stretch, looking at something as devastating as he has gone through. But I suddenly understand what it means to take something like my ability to see mountains, rose gardens and waterfalls for granted.

I don't ever want to take anything for granted again. I don't want to wait for my life to start. I get to be happy and see a beautiful world today and I want to make the most of it while I'm here, while I can. And I promise to remember to take my vitamins...