| 6/22/2005 |
EVERLASTING GAZE by The Smashing Pumpkins
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So I had an eye exam the other day. I wear glasses when I drive and need to some something at a distance. I admit that I probably should wear them more, but I don't feel my vision has become bad enough to warrant wearing them all the time. I would like to get a new pair of glasses at some point.
I'm famously known for not liking things to be touching or in my eyes. It is for this reason that I don't wear contacts. If you ask my best friend what will be put on my tombstone it would be, "Loved by Family and Friends - Don't Touch His Eyes."
I show up for my exam and contrary to co-workers beliefs I get right in at my appointed time. Which left no time to worry about the impending exam. Since I work at a hospital and medical college, it was no surprise that my doctor was a resident. That's fine with me. It would be comparable to going to barber school for a haircut. It's cheaper and they learn something in the process. I'm sure the resident told me her name, but I wasn't really focused on remembering it. I knew things would be hovering around my eyes for the next 30 minutes.
They do the standard tests. Cover this eye. Read this line. Cover that eye. Read that line. Follow the finger. Which is clearer? 1 or 2... 1 or 2... Some of these tests I think are kind of unfair. Or at least, I make them unfair. I try to be truthful when I can't read something. It wouldn't benefit me to have glass with an improper prescription. Yet when they ask me to read a line with my stronger eye and then ask me to read the same line with my weaker eye... it's hard not to just remember the 5 letters and repeat them. So I do both. I read the letter, but just flat out tell them, that it's blurrier. It's the competitiveness in me. I have to be able to read (or at least remember) all the lines in order to win. My prize? New glasses.
Then it came time for the pressure test. There are least two different ways they test for glaucoma by checking the pressure of your eyes. One is to shoot a puff of air into your eye. This method was always difficult for me. I would know the blast of air is coming and couldn't keep my eye open long enough to let them do it correctly. The latest method is to numb the surface of your eye and touch it with a diagnostic tool. This test actually involves touching my eye. As previously mentioned... not good.
I asked Dr. Perky McSmiles if there was anyway we could finish the exam without the pressure test. I explained to her my extreme dislike. She looked somewhat sympathetic, but said that she found she could be pretty convincing at times, she said smiling politely. I told her that I was gay and her boobs would not 'convince' me to have my eye probed. Ok so maybe those weren't my exact words. What I might have said was... "if you have to do the test."
Being the good doctor, she tells me step by step what she is doing and what she is going to do. She takes a bottle of yellow eye drops and says that the drops well numb my eye. I am giving a tissue to gently blot. I was instructed to do so gently because the drops soften my eyeball. I repeat. THEY SOFTEN. MY. EYEBALL. Eyeballs by design are soft. How much softer do they need to be in order to be probed!?
No more than 30 seconds after she puts the drops in my eye she begins to set up the diagnostic tool to measure the pressure in my eye. I get a little annoyed by this. Mainly because the last time I had this done they put the drops in my eyes and told me it would take 20 minutes for the drops to take effect. Here this girl is rarin' to go after barely a minute! Someone lied to me.
She tells me to look directly ahead and keep my eyes open as wide as possible. I can see the blue tipped light stick coming closer to my eye. While I can't feel it 'on' my eye. When I blink, I can feel it, which freaks me out because I know what it's doing. And I don't like it one bit. She is kind enough to try and comfort me during the exam, but after a while I'm becoming annoyed because she may be trying harder to keep me calm than to get the exam over with.
She is decently swift about examing both eyes. I'm sure that it was a lot less time that I thought it was in my head. Once the exam is done, I sit back in the chair and immediately feel light headed and I start sweating. I feel a little nauseous. I ask for a glass of water or something cold to drink and she asks if I am ok. I tell her I'm fine which I am, but I'm not all at the same time. I know it is just an anxiety attack because of how worked up I am from having my eye poked. She brings an apple juice, which was the furthest thing from cold that one could possibly find. It would do.
The main doctor comes in and goes through a few exams of his own. Repeating a few. As long as it wasn't being poked in the eye again I would be ok. He tries to make a couple light hearted statements and asks if I'm still with them and if I'm still breathing and chuckles. Let me just say, that when speaking to someone who is probably having a mild anxiety attack, asking them if they are still breathing is not amusing. Ass. He was nice enough, outside of that comment.
I left the exam a few minutes later, none the worse for wear. Prescription in hand. Now I can get new glasses.
It probably doesn't help that I've always got things in my eye. If something is going to hit me or get stuck on my face it is going to be in the eye. It's like a magnet for projectiles. My old roommate followed me throughout the apartment with frosting on his finger. I stopped and turned around to get an eye full of lemon frosting. Last time I made a cake for him! Another time, at a restaurant, as we were fooling around with the silverware I got a lemon seed flicked right into my eye. Bugs. Beverages. You name it. Straight for the eyes. If I could find a pair of goggles that didn't make me look like a freak I'd wear them. |
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I posted this @ 6/22/2005 02:46:00 PM.............Need a link?..........
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