Needlework, Really?

This was me at the eye doctor's where I just went for my annual checkup. It was hard enough driving home after with cloven hooves for hands on the wheel never mind having messed up peepers.The funny thing  is I went to this eye doctor’s with a sackful of needlework. NEEDLEWORK! At the eye doctor’s! where the first thing they do to you is tap your head back pry open your frightened little eyes and squeeze an oily yellow blurt of squirt into them!The squirt is a numbing agent of some kind  that anesthetizes the area so that they can then squeeze in the drug that dilates the pupils – or as the tech explained it, paralyzes the muscles so your poor irises CAN’T contract to protect the eye from too much light. Bring on the eclipses!  The light barrels on in and that’s how they check your pressures to be sure nobody backstage there is cookin’ up a sneaky case of glaucoma, which can leave you blind - or, in my mother's case, necessitate an iridectomy that leaves you with eyes like a goat (see above.)Make no mistake: I’m happy to have my eyes checked. In fact and I find all parts of the exam both entertaining and instructive. I just can’t seem to get it through my head every year that of the muscles are paralyzed I won’t be able to focus. That is, read.Or choose a playlist on my iPod.Or, God  knows, do needlework.And yet I brought the iPod.I brought the needleworkI brought even the Kindle thinking to set it on A VERY LARGE FONT for the 40 or so minutes I would be waiting for my pupils to dilate and my doctor to finish Facebooking her friends over her ham sandwich .In the end it was all foolishness. First, the wait was one 15 minutes, and second , the muscles of my eye were stopped in their tracks, like the butterflies my sister and I used to asphyxiate and then mount with common pins in our grandfather’s old cigar boxes.So no reading. No groovin’ on tunes. Certainly no needlework.I just had to sit looking like this for six hours waiting for the drug to wear off. Paralyzed is paralyzed it seems, however strong you may wish otherwise.