epiphany

Eye to Eye

This past Thursday I went to the eye doctor. I have not visited an eye doctor since 1998, I think. I may have gone once since then, but my glasses most certainly are from 1998. I got them before my first summer in Europe. My family's insurance was getting ready to drop me since I was graduating from college. So I took one last advantage of that insurance. When we were looking at frames, I commented that I was going to Europe for the summer. I was intending the man to understand that I would need something fairly sturdy since I would be doing a lot of traveling. I think he took it to mean I wanted to look stylish.

Had he known me, he would have realized that stylishness is not my thing. I am quite content (most of the time) to keep wearing the same clothes I've been wearing for years. I like plaids. I like bold, broad fields of color. I like heavy weaves, fabric with thick textures. Fabric that says, as you put it on, "Hi. I am wearing clothes." Fabric that isn't embarrassed it isn't skin. What truly stylish clothes I do and ever have had have been gifts either from my parents or my sister. I'm a lot like my dad in the hanging on to clothes until they fall apart thing. I am unlike my dad in that I will throw out the clothes once they have fallen apart. After Dad died we discovered shirts in his closet that easily dated back to my early childhood in the late '70s. He hadn't worn them for many years (at least not to our knowledge). But he couldn't give them up for some reason.

But back to the eye doctor.

I arrived at 7:30am for my 7:40 appointment. After filling out the paperwork and looking at the beautiful mountain landscape photos in the waiting room, I didn't even have time to open my book before the technician called for me. She did various and sundry eye thingies while I tried to make small talk. I have been concerned about my eyes for quite a while, and I was fairly certain they'd discover a serious illness in the course of the examination. Or they'd suggest that I get laser surgery. Either one was a nerve-wracking thought. So I made small talk to the best of my very limited small-talking ability. Finally I gave the technician my list of eye ailments and hoped she wouldn't call the mortuary then and there. She didn't. But she did ask several very probing questions about my list, all of which I was prepared to answer. Then she put some drops in my eyes and said that the doctor would be in shortly. I asked if she had seen the large floater in my right eye while she was doing her checks. She said that the drops would help the doctor find it.

Floaters happen to everyone somewhere along the line, but I happen to have two extremely inconvenient ones. I could actually draw them for you because they remain in the same spot--one in each eye--and they both happen to converge at normal reading distance. The one in my left eye is less obtrusive but is a small ring with two tails growing out of it from the left and right sides. The one in my right eye is a brown ring with an extremely long, often curly or clumpy tail. The ring doesn't move, but the tail does. That one appeared in April of 2003. The other is slightly more recent.

As I waited for the doctor, I tried to read a magazine. However, the drops were making any kind of near vision almost impossible. I could see across the room fine, but a magazine in my lap was indecipherable. I put the magazine back in its rack and rested my chin on my fingers, as I am wont to do.

Dr. D. Patrick Kelly, ophthalmologist, came in shortly after I settled back into the chair. He appeared to be about my age, although it was a little difficult to tell since my near vision was messed up. We chatted a bit as he checked my eyes. He started with the floaters, which could have been a symptom of a retinal tear or some other unpleasant disease (not that I can think of any pleasant diseases). He looked a good long while, and I offered to draw them for him. But ne'er a floater did he find. He said they must be "fine" floaters, just inconveniently placed. They can't really do anything for floaters anyway. While he was checking my eyes, I could see the entire blood vessel pattern of my retina. It actually looked pretty healthy to me. I normally only see parts of it when I take off my glasses and look at small light sources, like Christmas lights. I figured out it was my retinal pattern I was seeing in the lights sometime in high school--my senior year, I think.

Anyway, Dr. Kelly said my retinas look fine. No tears. No diabetic retinopathy there. (WebMD can be a dangerous thing.)

Then we discussed my difficulty in reading music, a problem I began to notice during grad school. Unless I was focusing on an individual line, the whole page of notes began to swim. Then the page swam whether or not I was focusing on one line. I figured it just had to do with being tired, grad school being such a wonderful place to promote exhaustion and all.

Since the pages would swim, the doctor wasn't too sure he'd be able to help. Then he tried doing a prism test. I've known for quite some time that my right eye, the one with the nasty floater, is also lazy. The prisms helped reveal the extent of its laziness, which is roughly incorrigible. We're guessing that its laziness is most, if not all, of the problem. He gave me some eye exercises to do. I've tried them the last two nights, and they are indeed exercises. I feel exhaustion akin to doing weights by the time my fifteen minutes is up. He said it normally takes three months to notice any real improvement. While I'm looking forward to the end of three months, I'm very thankful to have something to help. He said that I could just get glasses with a prism built in, but neither one of us liked the implications of that. My eye would likely continue to get lazier and lazier as it grew dependant on the prism, and meanwhile, I would look like one of those freaky people you see on TV or in movies like Waterworld (if you haven't seen it, don't).

Lastly, I asked about that ever touted and advertised modern eye treatment, LASIK. He told me something I didn't expect. The last time I had seen an eye doctor, one of the nurses saw my prescription and told me I should just have laser surgery. That was when the technique was fairly new, and it's been a prickling in my mind ever since. Despite all the apparent success stories, I still have some strong reservations about having beams of light slice up my cornea. Reservations like, "What happens in forty years?" Things people still can't answer since they don't actually have long-term results.

Well, Dr. Kelly put my mind at ease, at least until technology improves significantly. He said that with my prescription, particularly in good old righty, they would have to do extensive tests to make sure that I actually have enough cornea. In other words, there's a good chance the laser would burn clear through. And that would be bad. So bad that I am not going to even have to think about having laser surgery. While I don't like how glasses (or contacts) make me feel tied down or restricted, I would much rather use something that not only will give me a sharper visual image than laser surgery likely would but also will not blind me horribly.

At my foolish and somewhat ignorant request, Dr. Kelly put "reversing drops" in my eyes. "They sting," he warned me, "and they'll make your eyes red for about twenty minutes." But I am a man. I don't care if people will think I've been crying or smoking pot. I have had red, itchy eyes. The earlier drops had stung a bit. I have even had surgery in China. I survived when the one OR nurse who spoke English said, "This is going to hurt. A lot." I told him I would be fine.

The first one went in, and I thought, well, that's not so . . . "Ow!" I cried. "Ow! Ow! Ow!"

"I told you they would sting."

"Yes, and you were right."

Dr. Kelly left me to my red, itchy, watery, burning eyes, and a nurse led me out to the front desk. As I was paying my copay (I love having insurance), the receptionist asked if I wanted to look at frames right away, but I declined since I needed to get to work. I, who could not see clearly enough to sign my own name to the receipt, expected to be able to somehow work at the computer in the three minutes it took me to walk to my office.

I call my supervisor and told her that I couldn't see nearby objects for the life of me. She said I could try doing some other kind of work for now. I said that I couldn't think of what I would be able to work on from across the room. Then I went back to the doctor's and looked at eye glasses.

"That was fast," the receptionist said. I explained the dilemma. She laughed and said, "You can't see, but you decided to come back to try on new glasses. Interesting. Take a seat, and I'll get someone for you."

I ended up spending about an hour and a half trying on frames. Like I said before, I'm not the most fashionable person around. Seattle is a very fashionable city. I tried on some really bold, strange frames. But that was a good thing. As I became more used to seeing my face without round glasses, I was able to choose more clearly among a variety of styles. When I had narrowed my choices down to four pairs, I commented on how difficult it was to tell how they looked when I was holding the mirror three inches from my face. The optician said, "Just a second" and got a friend's camera phone. In a moment of customer service brilliance, he took a picture of me with each set of frames. I was then able to put on my own glasses and see how I looked. I immediately ruled out two of the frames.

I won't say what the final choice looked like because I want to surprise my mom when she gets to see me. I also have not gotten them back yet (they'll be done "in five to seven working days." I'm hoping for five). I will say that they are stylish--amazingly so for me. However, they don't say, "LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT MY GLASSES! BWAH HA HA HA HA!" They are confident, but not self-consumed. They say, "I am not embarrassed to be wearing glasses."

I am especially not embarrassed to be wearing glasses when I think of the laser that won't be burning through my eyeball.

Posted by jonhanneman at December 11, 2004 8:02 PM