The Old Doc to the New Doc Blues

These are your eyes, seen form above. Pretty choice pic huh?So I just changed eye doctors yesterday. I had a perfectly capable one but my husband is a trustee at this famous eye hospital and it finally dawned on me that I should be going there for my care.Plus my night vision really sucks lately.The eye doctor who used to treat me was honest with me always. She said there was a tiny ‘fog’ of cataract in one eye, which we would watch. Each time I came to see her she noted my mother’s glaucoma history and told me I had 'drusen' in my eye, which always made me feel like laughing. “Your drusen keeps on Snoozin'" I would think every time she said it.And you know I liked her well enough - even though in these last years she seemed to imply that I was some ancient thing. For example when I said I was on no medications save for a tiny dose of Levoxyl she looked at me the way they do when they think you're lying about how many drinks you have in a day.Then she said the time was coming when I probably couldn't wear contacts anymore. “God forbid!” I cried. “Why do you say that?”“Because older people have trouble seeing their eyes and getting that little tiny lens in there.  Plus, well you know, with the wrinkles and all….”Still, she was a warm person.  And as soon as I sat down in front of this new eye doc I to begin missing her sharply.He kept interrupting me as I told him what the other doctor said.“A cataract?!" he thundered. "People shouldn't throw around the word ‘cataract’! I would not call when you have a cataract and you certainly don’t need a surgical procedure!”I mentioned the contacts issue too and how sad it would be if I could no longer wear contacts.“Why on earth would you be unable to keep wearing contacts,” he barked.  “Unless your hands become crippled with arthritis?”He said in so many words that glaucoma isn’t inherited so I could just chill the hell out about that too.Then he told me everybody has bad night vision, and that I should just go get the specially-lensed glasses.I started to say “No but, see, I don't LIKE to wear glasses”, but I knew he didn't care to hear it.  I guess I’ll wear my contacts same as always and over them, at night, I’ll wear some plain-glass glasses, made in this special glare cancelling way. "I'll see you in a year,” he wound up. “Call with any problems” he added and I was out the door.So yeah, he might have been a mite grouchy but his news was good and the head technician in the place who did all the eye chart stuff couldn’t have been nicer. When she first came in the room and saw my reading through the records I had brought from my old eye doctor we had a good laugh. “It says here that I kept coming in with my contacts rolled back in my head somewhere.  It says sometimes I’d come because I had two lenses in the same eye, one on top of the other.“Hah!” she cried merrily. “Don’t feel bad. I couldn’t get a contact lens in if you stood over me with a gun.” And thus drops the curtain on another eye exam. I went out into the day blinded by the light with my scary dilated pupils ....but happy enough – as long as I was careful not to dwell on the fact that exactly nobody out there has any kind of decent night vision (!) 

Blinded by the Light

I had my annual visit with the eye doctor yesterdayWhich I dread always.Because of how they dilate your eyes.Because of how the first drops sting! and the second drops open those pupils so they grow into two great lacunas in your head.I looked just like these pictures above and below. ( Wo, I see my mustache is growing in again but you get the idea.)PLUS, not to make a big deal here. but you can't read.And everything is so BRIGHT! Even with the roll-open-and-plant-on-your-face shades they gave me I almost had to throw my skirts up over my head to keep from having my retinas scorched by old Mister Sun. (And it was a cloudy day!)I couldn't even peer into my trusty mobile device the way we all do, consulting the mite-sized characters on its tiny screen the way the Ancients once studied the entrails of sacrificial animals.Nope.All I could do was stagger about in a Walgreen's more or less window shopping the easier -to-identify items like Huggies boxes and emesis basins.Here's me a full three hours after the drops. I had just tried to do business in the  Post Office, but ended up pocketing the letters I meant to mail and neatly affixing stamps to the corners of my two prescriptions.Oy! At least I only to do this once a year

Eye Exam

It’s like when the dentist says “You’ll feel a little pressure,” then  kneels on your chest and tries to pull out your whole lower jaw.Only here at the eye doctor they say  “This may sting just a little.” Then they squeeze three drops of pool-cleaning acid into your eyes. That’s for the glaucoma test.The three more drops per side are to dilate your pupils into deep black pools so they can see if all those quadratic equations you learned back in high school are still kicking around in there. It was the annual eye exam for me yesterday where besides staring sightless into a wall for an hour I also learned a lot because I asked a lot.Specifically I learned that:

• You can indeed tell if people are heavy drinkers by examining their eyes.
• You can also tell if they have high blood pressure.
• You can tell if they have age spots in their eyes because well, there they are.
• You can tell if they’re scaredy-cats by saying “Suspicious of glaucoma” even as they are writing this on your chart and then noticing if they start  hyperventilating ("Not to worry." the doctor said. "It just means your mother had glaucoma.")   She sure did have glaucoma. They found the glaucoma in her and sent her to the hospital without even letting her go home and pack a suitcase. They did a bilateral iridectomy and she went through the rest of her life with goats' eyes.

The age spots in the eye are called Drusen I also learned. "Do NOT look it up on the internet!" she said.  "They’re only a problem when they appear in the macula; yours are more nasal and temporal," meaning crowded into the corners of my eyes where they're hanging out like middle schoolers at the mall.She was nice, as always, but the technician was really great. She got briefly called away from my vision test when a young aide stepped into the room and said "I have a blinker next door. Can you help me?""What's a blinker?" I asked."Oh just a person who can’t keep his eye open for the drops." Sensible man, I thought. She slipped out and was back in a jiffy. "And hat do you do in a  case like that? Hypnotize the person?""Ha ha no" she said then paused for that crucial comical beat:  “We just give  ‘em a good hard whack on the head.”I laughed, stared sightless at the wall another three hours, then went home and looked up Drusen on the internet.