You can see better before you go into the eye doctors than when you come out.
They “dilate” your eyes. This is so you can’t see out, but they can see in.
They take really bright lights and shine in your eyes and ask you if you can see. I wonder what the right answer is. I always say, “Yes, I can see a bright light”.
But then they say, “Can you read that chart on the wall?.
Me, “Sure, if you could turn off that bright light”.
But they don’t turn off the bright light and after that you can’t see anything.
At one point they put you in a chair and ask you to rest your chin on a… a… well I guess it’s a chin rest, and then they take pictures of the inside of your eye.
They say look down, they take a picture.
They say look down right, picture taken.
Down left, picture.
Just left, picture.
Left up, picture.
Eventually there is no where else to look and they have a billion pictures of your eye.
It didn’t used to be this way. I used to go to a local doctor. The main thing at this place was my wife used to babysit the doctor. That’s when you know you are really old when you know fully grown up people who used to be kids and now they are your doctors.
I wanted to ask the doctor if my wife was a “HOT” babysitter when she was a teenager. You know she had to be since she is so hot now as a middle aged / getting more middle aged all the time person.
But I refrained from asking knowing it was not good for my long term health. Being addicted to eating and all given the high likelihood that my wife would hear and I'd be eating sticks and grass.
At the old doctor’s office they didn’t have fancy machines. They employed labor instead of capital. When it was time to do the glaucoma test to see what the pressures are in your eye a lady named Roberta whose first language was not English would come in the room. She would clean off her pinky finger with a sterile wipe and stick it in your eye and then announces “It’sa fine”. She had an “a” on it’s. This of course means she’s from Italia, or somewhere else.
But back to the current eye exam…
After all the dilation and pictures of my eye then, finally I got to see the eye doctor. I got a different doctor because mine was busy. This “different doctor”, was 12 years old.
She came in the room and immediately announced that she was a doctor. “Hi I’m doctor Smith” she said crisply and directly so that you wouldn’t be taken aback by the fact that she was, by all appearances, 12 years old.
After she was finished looking into my eyes with a bright light and asking me if I could see then she put a picture on the counter and announced…
“This is a picture of your eye.”
It was a very impressive. A picture of my eye! I could barely believe it. Apparently all those pictures resulted in this amazing image of MY EYE! They had done a magnificent job with those fancy machines.
I said in amazement, “That’s my eye!”
That flustered the doctor who said, “No this isn’t YOUR eye.”
Me… “But you said it was my eye”.
Her… “It is AN eye. I said YOUR eye because it is a representation of your eye.”
Me… “But you said it was my eye.”
I was really dissapointed. Although she had said it was my eye, it was not my eye.
She had some sort of marker thing and she drew a circle on “my eye”. Where my cataracts would be if that were my eye. I was trying to fight through my disappointment in not seeing real, actual pictures of MY EYE, and maybe I lost interest… but I’m pretty sure she said that they were not goin to operate on my eye(s), because I have think corn-e-as, whatever that means.
They said I need to come back in a year. In that length of time I might maybe have recovered from this exam and then they can again shine a bright light in my eye and ask me if I can see.
©David L Arment