September 22, 2014
Greetings from the corner of my eye,
There is all kinds of maintenance I have been delaying. I just had my oil changed about 3000 miles
late, not to mention the tires need rotating.
I know I should replace the furnace filters, and somehow I have managed
to go two or three years without cleaning my gutters.
And I was way past due to have my eyes checked.
One nice thing about going to the eye doctor is he doesn’t
ask you if you’ve been flossing. There
is no panicked floss marathon for the 24 hours before the appointment in hopes
of fooling other adults into thinking you actually maintain your eyes.
This is not a new or complicated process, but for whatever
reason I still felt a little anxious going to my eye appointment. I may have subconsciously been inventorying
all the things in my body that are degrading, wondering if I might have been
better off making an appointment with the podiatrist.
After I filled out the forms indicating that I haven’t
experienced any of the 200 diseases listed since my last visit, (When was my
last tetanus shot? Did I have Elephantitis? Hmm.) I was ushered into the first challenge.
Here a very polite and efficient young woman administered
the ‘pre-tests’. This is where they weed
out the slackers. If you can perform
well enough here, they let you see the doctor.
If not, they fit you for a guide dog and send you back into the world.
I’m a runner, and I’ll admit I am a little competitive, and I
wanted to do well in my exam. I was
hoping to score really high in my age group, maybe take home a citation or a
ribbon, or maybe a trophy. In the back
of my mind I was sort of hoping I might get mentioned in some Journal of
Optometric Science for my remarkable optical prowess.
My vision specialist called me Mr. Smith, so I assume she
was younger than me. The first test was
trying to read her name tag without my glasses, and I’ll just say she will
remain anonymous. She began by giving me
drops that would first dilate my eyes and then numb them. I don’t really want numb eyes; I have had
other parts of my body go numb and it’s not a sensation I relish. I also had this idea that if the drops
penetrated behind my eyes they might cause brain-numbness, another sensation I
am familiar with and also not high on my relish list. I went along with it when she told me that a
lot of little kids cry when she puts the numbing drops in, so it was nice to
work with men like me who were not afraid of a little stinging. (I only cried a little)
She was very encouraging.
She kept telling me I was doing great, like when she handed me a little
paddle and asked me to cover my left eye.
“No, your other left eye, …that’s it you’re doing great.”
She gave me a couple easy eye charts, a warm up for the real
tests, and asked me to read the smallest line I could. I licked my lips, wishing I had practiced for
this. I squinted, focused, mustering all
of the ocular strength I had. I didn’t
want to try the smallest line at the bottom, which would be showing off, so I
daringly ripped through the next line up.
“E, R, 6, T, 2.” I said, adding a little Scottish brogue to
sound rakish and devil-may-care.
“Ok, but there are no numbers, just letters.” She said
avoiding eye contact. “You’re doing
great.”
I considered guessing again.
I quickly did the math. Twenty
six potential letters, four lines of letters with 5 characters each (I think),
so the possible combinations are…
I read the top line.
She had me look into various machines that flashed random
lights in varying ways to see if I had stopped paying attention. In one test I was asked to focus on a hot air
balloon at the end of a desert road. It
was a strange image, and it occurred to me it might have been some kind of
symbolic clue, like something from the DaVinci Code. I couldn’t crack it.
Even so, somehow I bluffed my way past the pretest and was allowed
to see my optometrist. After some small
talk where he subtly tried to test me by moving around the room to see if I
could follow him with my eyes, he began the official exam. The Big One.
This would separate the average from the above average nearsighted.
He used some kind of scanner that I believe looks directly into
your brain. Much as I trust my
optometrist, I am pretty sure he stole my social security number and the
combination to my high school locker.
He tested me on the Eye Game machine. This is where you look through what appears
to be one of those devices that Neo used to get into the Matrix. The doctor spins a variety of blurry lenses in
front of your eyes and you have to guess which is better. Again, I am pretty competitive, but it turns
out they don’t let you know how your score stacks up against other myopic old
men with bad Scottish accents.
After a while he took pity on me and started giving me
clues. “I think you’ll find this one is
a little clearer, isn’t it?” I’m certain
that if you can’t pass these tests they can’t let you drive, and the last thing
he needed was me in his waiting room all afternoon asking strangers how they
scored in the glaucoma contest.
At this point in the process I was required to choose new eyeglass
frames. This is exactly like shopping
for a bathing suit in March after a long winter of Moose Tracks ice cream and
pale-skin-inducing TV shows.
To begin with, my eyes are dilated, which means I am having trouble
seeing the eyeglasses I am selecting.
You’ll find this as an example in the dictionary under ‘irony’.
I have admired glasses on a few other people, thinking that
I might look good in a similar style. I
started noticing what the fashionable European men were wearing; thinking that that
kind of an update for my face would be good. I was, of course, completely wrong.
I tried on a few pair on and received polite looks from the
staff, along with cautions comments like “What sort of a look are you going for
here?” When I mentioned the Euro-look
they asked: “Like more of an Elton John-Euro-look?” In the end I trusted them,
since they were honest enough to tell me when I was trying on women’s
frames.
There is something incredibly awkward in this process. Suddenly my nose was much larger than I
remember, and I was very aware that one of my ears is lower than the other. Every frame I tried on looked like I was
wearing a disguise.
In the end I selected sensible frames befitting a back of
the pack visionary, and paid whatever the blurry invoice said, which was a test
for which I could not prepare enough. I
promised everyone in the office I would not wait so long to be back to see
them, which none of us believed. I
thanked them effusively and bid them all goodbye, and started out to my
car. At which point which someone said; “Ah, that’s a mirror, the door is just to your
left. No, ... your other left. That’s it, you’re doing great.”
Hope this finds you 20/20,
David
Copyright © 2014 David Smith
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