Life Advice – Do It Now. Just Do it.

Years ago – it’s been a couple of decades now – I had a revelation. A tremendous idea I laughed about for a week. We decided to sell the house, and before we listed it, I went over the place room by room, in and out, making a list of what needed to be done to get it ready to hand it off to someone else. I tallied a page and a half of stuff and spent about five hundred bucks. I dreaded doing all the work, but so be it.

We’d lived there for three or four years, and stuff just accumulated. I was a well-paid trim carpenter and furniture maker, and you know the saying: the worst looking house on the block is the carpenter’s. He’s always working on other homes and doesn’t want to get his tools out when he gets home. I was guilty.

So, I kid you not. I went to the lumber supply on Friday night to get materials and hit the ground running on Saturday morning. I finished by dinner, and the house looked almost new. I touched up a few bits of paint after church on Sunday,

And that was it.

I was amazed and a little embarrassed. Why had I lived with so many half-done projects, smudged walls, and weeds growing in the wrong places? It took a day to do the work. Had I wanted to, I could have done an hour a week and hardly noticed it and lived in a house that looked like something I cared about.

***

My wife had a similar epiphany this week. About a month ago, she came down with the flu. It was Type A, and she said loud and clear that she had never in her life felt this bad. This is a woman with a few broken bones to her name, too. This was on Friday, and by Sunday, she was feeling better except she couldn’t see well from one eye. To cool the flu, she had dabbed her face with alcohol and thought she might have gotten some in her eye. In a flash, we were on the way to any eye doctor open on the Lord’s Day. We found a guy at a mall glasses store and asked him to look.

“I would go straight to the emergency room.” He didn’t even look up from his scope.

“Huh?” I mean, what’s the trouble?”

He wouldn’t say a thing. I’m guessing his reticence was a corporate guideline. Don’t say anything that can get us into trouble.

We drove calmly to the emergency room and dutifully waited seven hours to be seen. The on-call doc knew about eyes and said she was fine.

“Just a minor scratch on the cornea.”

He recommended we see another doctor on Monday, and they can fix us right up. We did, and they didn’t. They looked for an hour and said she needed a specialist.

“Let us make an appointment. We’re not sure what’s going on, but he’s the best guy in the state.”

Our minor scratch became a roaring lion.

We go to the specialist, and he looks deep into her dark brown Asian eyes – we learned that deep brown Asian eyes are challenging  – and asks if she would mind if his staff takes a look?

“No trouble. I’m always glad to be of use to medicine,” she groaned.

Four techs and a doctor traipse in and our specialist says to get a good look. They might have seen pictures of this in school, but he will bet a month’s salary that they’ve never seen it in real life. Each takes a turn and then we finally get to business.

“The bad news is that you’re going blind.” Nice. Great bedside manner.

The good news is that we can fix you right up. We just have to open up your eye, pull everything out, and put all new stuff back in. You’ll be great!”

And that’s what we did this week. We thought, well, my wife thought hard about it. I can still see, she thought, and these drops make it bearable, and he said I’ve got a decade to go, and do I really want some guy taking a scalpel to cut my eye open? Do I want to spend the money? (We found that insurance only pays a part of this. The cheap part.)

We decided yes.

She prepped for the knife and walked out an hour later wearing a plastic pirate patch and needing badly to go to bed. We made the seven-minute drive to the hotel, and I tucked her into bed and she passed out for six hours. Her six-hour nap turned into a full night of sleep and she woke the next morning at seven. Following instructions – she’s a great patient – she pulled the shield off and dropped liquid tears into both eyes to wash out any junk, and, “Oh my gosh,  I can see!”

She read everything she could only guess at before. The exit sign read E-X-I-T now instead of a green blur. She read a book without cheaters. Everything was clear. We went back to the doctor for the day-after checkup, and they were just as shocked. It usually took about a month to recover and heal. She took a night.

We laugh about it, now. It’s easy to laugh when it’s done and turns out well. But, just like working on my house, in half an hour and for a few bucks, she sees now better than she ever has. Ever. Since donning glasses for the first time as a four-year-old.

The life advice? It’s almost always worth it to take care of the issue. And faster is almost always better. Even if it costs money.

Seleh.