Part Time Vampire

    All through my recovery from cataract surgery I was unable to give myself the necessary eye drops. No surprise, I'd never been able to before surgery, and necessity is the mother of invention, not instillation. Reed handled most of my scheduled doses. My daughter and daughter-in-law did eye duty when they dropped off kids on Grandma Day. I took the bottles with me to appointments--eye, massage, hair, even dental. I also asked neighbors and a visitor. I probably would have let a total stranger put drops in my eyes rather than attempt it myself. But now, long after those eye drops are no longer needed, I am trying to learn the skill because my eyes are red much of the time. I told Reed I look like a part time vampire. He said if I was a vampire, I wouldn't be able to see my reflection, much less my eyes, in the mirror. I told him that was why I am a part time vampire, I can still be seen in mirrors and be out in the sun. Although that last statement is mostly untested in Kalispell in the wintertime.

  The reason my eyes are red and that Reed and I sometimes have bags under our eyes we could rent out as storage space, is because we have not had a dozen full nights of deep sleep since Tracy died two years ago. But we can't blame it all on Tracy's death because we were having trouble sleeping before that. As people get older it is normal to have sleep issues because mature bodies have less melatonin and more maladies. Melatonin supplements are available although, as I shared in my blog Supplemental, replacing one casualty among the cascade failure that is aging does not reset our body clock. Which, just like the Timex commercials Takes a Licking and Keeps on Ticking, unfortunately, it is counting down. And even if the melatonin helps, the maladies linger on. In my case, neck and shoulder arthritis often make for restless slumber. But insomnia does not come with a note, most of the time we don't know why we can't sleep.

   I have not found that the drops I manage to actually get in my eyes reduce redness enough to push me from part time vampire to retired vampire status. There is an old Rod Stewart song about having Bette Davis eyes. I will have to settle for having Bela Lugosi's.