I know my hearing won’t be as keen as it once was. I’ll call out to my husband, “Where are you?”
He’ll shout back, “I’m in the bathroom.”
Ten minutes later when he walks out of the bathroom, I’ll ask, “Why did you tell me you were barbecuing ribs?”
I won’t be able to discern where noises come from. Every time the clothes in the washer spin dry, I’ll run outside expecting to see a helicopter overhead. When the timer on the microwave goes off, I’ll answer the door. I’ll play a little game with my grandkids. When they holler for me, I’ll stand still and yell, “Come find me. I’m hiding.”
I know my vision won’t be as crisp. When I go to church and sit in the back pews, the people on the podium will look like aliens with no eyes or noses. At a distance, I might mistake a Labrador retriever for a friend I was meeting for lunch. You know, the one with an extra long face.
We all know that memory wanes in later years. Already I think I’m eating more because I can’t remember if I ate breakfast. That might account for what I thought was a decline in my depth perception. It may be my new girth. I bang into door jams, bump my head on open cupboards, and stub my toes on chair legs. Who would have thought my toes could gain weight?
But the one thing no one told me was that my body parts would no longer close. At night I placed cotton balls over my eyes and then scotch taped my eyes shut to prevent dry eye. My husband thought Little Orphan Annie had found her way into our bed. But when I pulled the tape off the next morning… Oou wee! That evening, I held the cotton balls over my eyelids in place with a strip of wide elastic I wrapped around my head, held together with a couple of slip stitches.
Even my jaw drops open when I sleep. The canyon makes my mouth so parched that I can’t even pull my upper lip down over my teeth in the morning. I wear a retainer to keep my teeth and lips where they belong and a chin strap to close my mouth. The taunt strap pushes my cheeks up around my eyes. I think it contributes to my wrinkles.
They didn’t tell me that while I may not be able to discern the human voice, I can pick up every single twitch, slurp, and swallow. At night, I can hear my husband scratch is eyebrows.
Last night my husband, the little retired homemaker that he’s become, stuck a load of towels in the washer before we climbed into bed. The spin dry cycle started, I jumped up out of a deep sleep, tripped over his tennis shoes, and slammed my forehead on the bathroom door jam.
At least the swelling smoothed out a few wrinkles.
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Oh, so true. The visual was great!