Thank goodness life doesn’t imitate art…

Today was my yearly eye-doctor appointment.

Doing this for 20 or so years, I’m pretty used to the drill, but my eyes will never be used to mid-day dilation!

Whose idea was it to write an opera about diabetes, where so much of the story hits so close to home?!?

The entire time, it was like the plot of my opera was playing out in real life – I was Charlie.
I obsessed on the thought of how ironic, or fitting it would be if I was diagnosed with proliferative retinopathy… would my ophthalmologist speak the dialogue right out of my opera, as if reading a script?

I had the foresight to make an audio recording of the check-up, to which the doctor happily obliged. I’m so glad I did, as she added a real sense of humanity to the otherwise clinical approach I wrote for the scene. When I told her she gets an aria in my opera, she was thrilled!

Never in my life has it been so clear that diabetes is truly an invisible illness.

As all of these things were going through my head, as I felt my sugars rising from the stress, as I worried about my vision in the future… this is what she saw:

<—–   The windows to my soul.

And through them, she saw nothing.
Nothing but healthy retinas with no more micro-aneurisms than before.

Even given the clean bill of eye health, I won’t say the worrying was all for naught. If it’s even possible, I feel more connected to Charlie. With any luck, so will my audience.