As recently as four or five years ago, I enjoyed 20/20 vision and was something of a dick about it. As the years rolled by, I more frequently found myself the only non-bespectacled attendee at social gatherings, and my smugness was beyond measure. At length, I noted that my eyes seemed to tire more easily after hours of staring into a computer display at work, and M marched me to the optician’s for fairly weak lenses which I reluctantly – and seldom – wore. Denial, river in Egypt, etcetera.

Still later, my near vision – reading distance – deteriorated to the point where I could no longer avoid wearing the specs. I chalked it up to middle age and its myriad indignities, and blundered on through life until I collided with diabetes last December. The metabolic disorder announced itself in several ways, most notably in an severe overnight degradation of my far vision. Anything beyond a six foot radius from myself looked pretty much like the Mount Rushmore image in the accompanying Ron Paul poster – hazy and out of focus, not unlike Ron Paul himself. Unsettling, to be sure.

So it was off to the doctor, tests and meds, the assembly of the D-Team. Even before the official diagnosis, I understood that my new vision woes resulted from the vastly increased level of glucose in my blood: big blocky molecules of the sugar essentially blowing out the tiny, overmatched capillaries in my eyes. After about nine days on the standard issue anti-diabetic drug metformin, my blood glucose level dropped to the point where my far vision sharpened to normal – and again, the noticeable change was overnight.

I still had substandard reading vision – which seemed to have worsened a bit – so it was back to the eye doc for a new and more powerful prescription. The specs with their multi-focal lenses were uncomfortable at first and I had some trouble adjusting, but a week or so later found me wearing them even when I did not need them to read.

And then something happened which I did not expect.

As I was browsing the web one evening last week – a time of day when my sight was always at its weakest and most in need of correction – I was startled to find that (one) I had forgotten to don my glasses upon coming home from work earlier, and (two) I was viewing the laptop display with no problems whatsoever. It was as though my vision had returned – on its own – to 20/20, or something in that area code.

And that’s where things stand even now. I haven’t worn my glasses in days, and haven’t needed to. My thinking is that my pre-diabetic vision – not quite right at close quarters, but not quite so bad that I felt compelled to use glasses – was actually a symptom of my, er, pre-diabetes. This suggests that my blood sugar levels were above normal well before last December – which makes sense to me now – and that this was the cause for my earlier vision problems. Once I began to address the blood glucose levels, the vision had a chance to correct itself – in full (or close to it)?

Maybe, baby. Or maybe not. Time will tell.

In the meanwhile, I’ll just be watchful, as it were – and perhaps less smug about good vision.