Taking for Granted

Don't you hate hectic days?

Today was one of those for us. We hurried to get to the doctor's office on time, in an area unfamiliar to us. We got lost twice. In downtown Dallas. I really have no idea how we found our way back to the right road, and with minutes to spare. It was rush, rush, rush, then wait.

We were waiting at an eye doctor's office. I'm saying eye doctor because I really don't know how to spell that "Ophtha" word. It keeps coming up in my spell checker, so I've given up. We waited for quite awhile. Two hours, actually. But it wasn't the office's fault, it was the blasted transformer outside that decided to blow out the electricity of an entire city block. That's OK, though. Sometimes waiting is good. Sometimes it allows us to think.

It's easy to think about our eyesight when waiting in an eye doctor's office. All of those posters up about the eye structures, the complexity of it all...it's a wonder we can see at all. The eye is so very complex, that if any one thing doesn't work properly, you just can't see. period.

A friend of mine and I had a discussion once about what we would rather lose: our sight or our hearing. For me, hands down it was hearing. For her, hands down it was sight. I didn't want to lose my independence, or the ability to see the faces of loved ones. She didn't want to lose the things about life that mattered to her, either. She loved the sound of her loved one's voices, music, the things that kept her plugged in to her surroundings.

Either way, It's hard to think about life without one of these things. We are lucky. Even though we know that our son has lost partial sight in one of his eyes, we're still lucky. He functions normally, and thanks to all of that waiting today, we know that he probably always will. No further damage. He can still play baseball, play with his beloved Legos, and we're thrilled with that. He's been doing it all for a long time, we just never knew.

But it's times like this that makes a parent, or person, stop and be grateful for the things we take for granted. Waiting isn't always a bad thing.