When I graduated from high school, the only thing I wanted was contact lenses. My parents hesitated about buying them for me. However, I wore thick lens glasses for most of my life and wanted to eliminate them. Throughout my school days, I endured teasing and downright bullying about being a 'four-eyes' and having 'pink eye.' 

I can own up to being a 'four-eyes', but I never had 'pink eye' in my entire life. I had a serious infection that malingered for years after my friend threw sand in my eyes. The infection had been forgotten by the time I reached my high school graduation. Although my parents were still reluctant, they gave in, and I got my contact lenses. 

Ok, so shedding the glasses was definitely an ego thing. I was seventeen and enjoyed wearing fashionable clothes, going out dancing with my boyfriend, and generally having a good time.  A song came out by the Stray Cats called Sexy and Seventeen. It was the perfect song for that time of my life. I would call it the defining song of that year. 

I loved my contacts.  I felt young and free--ready to face the world as a new graduate. My high school days were behind me, and the summer stretched long and sandy. My friends and I took that time for granted, spending our days at the beach and nights in local teen clubs. We had the future to think about, but not right then.

Living close to Disney World and Busch Gardens, it was nothing to jump in the car and spend the day at a theme park. I could say we lived high on the hog, but that ended too quickly for me. That old eye infection returned, this time putting my eyesight in jeopardy. 

The contacts I wanted so desperately caused a myriad of problems. This paragraph is gruesome, so if you want to pass it over, be my guest. Basically, they adhered to my eyes. When I took them out, portions of my eyes came with them. I returned to the prescribing eye doctor several times. He told me my eyes had to get used to the contacts and the situation would clear up after time passed. I continued to use them until it became obvious the infection was not going to clear up. The doctor finally came to the same conclusion and immediately sent me to a specialist.   

Luckily, I stumbled across the right doctor at the right time. He had just arrived in town; I was his new patient number three. He went straight to work, carefully cleaning the infection out of my eyes. The pain was intense, and often, either my right or left eye was bandaged overnight or for several days. If the pain grew beyond endurance, we would call him after hours, and he would clean up my eyes again, then rebandage them.

It took ages to finally get the infection completely cleared up. My life was on hold for several years before I could see or function correctly. In the between time, I saw a myriad of specialists in all fields of medicine trying to discover what was wrong with my eyes. As with the previous infection, there was never a clear diagnosis of the situation.   

The eye doctor eventually cleared me to go to work, and I could get a driver's license. I longed to pick up the novel I began writing in high school. My only desire was to become a novelist. My father insisted I get a job (apparently, writing isn't a job--I'm sure many of you have heard that one before). A friend of the family arranged for a job at a local department store, and I went to work. Actually, I believed I could write during the evenings and weekends, but, of course, my thoughts and realities didn't come together as planned. That's another deal I'm sure many other writers have encountered in their long journey to create their novels.