Recently, a news anchor here was reporting on the flooding of the Red River between Minnesota and North Carolina…My office (and this is no joke) recently designated April 1 as “Employee Appreciation Day.” Kind of gives you a good sense of where you stand, I think.
Speaking of not seeing things clearly, I recently had the opportunity to visit the Eye Doctor. I hadn’t been for awhile and I noticed that some things were a little blurry.
So I went through the regular exam. It started like this:
“Put your chin right here, place your forehead against the strap, look though the lens and tell me what you see.”
“I can see the wall” I said earnestly.
“Do you see anything on the wall?” the Dr. asked.
“Some very faint blue lines…”
“Can you read any of them?”
“Does accuracy count?” I asked…
Then we started the counting game, you know…
“Is one better, or two? Two, or three? Is three better than one? If I have 6 oranges and you bring me 9 apples, can you read line 4?”
I think I would have done a lot better if I had brought my calculator along…
Next came the eye drops and dilation. I did not cry this time when the Doctor put the drops in, but I did discover that it's possible to curl up into the fetal position while sititng in the exam chair…
After my irises had become the size of half-dollars, I was taken to another room for the next round of testing. This was starting to become more grueling than finals week in engineering school…
The first test was the peripheral vision test, which I aced. I haven’t aced any test since the 3rd grade so I was feeling mighty proud of myself. That would turn out to be short lived…
The next station in the torture room was the ol’ “Were gonna have you look into this lens with your dilated eye ‘n then were gonna snap a photo of the back of your brain using the brightest flash of light known to exist and you might lose consciousness and then when you get out of ICU we’ll do the other eye” test.
I managed to survive the first one, but I saw the most remarkable pink circle in front of my eye which gradually changed to blue and then to green before fading.
Immediately after the second photo of the back of my brain, I was taken into a brightly lit room with hundreds of pairs of glasses on the wall.
At this point I was staggering around like a punch-drunk fighter. Fortunately I only knocked over 3 of the 17 wall-mounted display cases. Oh, and a couple of chairs in the waiting area. And possibly a plant or two…
I was then asked to pick out some frames. I’m very good at this and picked the, ahem, low-cost “Call the travel agent honey, we’re taking the kids and your mother to Europe this summer!” frames…
I figured out that buying glasses is a lot like buying cars, there is a bewildering array of options, all of which seem essential. By the time I was done, I had chosen the sun roof, the 12 speaker audio system, and the off-road package. I think somebody’s kid gets to go to Stanford because of me…
After negotiating a second mortgage with my banker I paid my bill and got ready to leave. Of course you can’t leave the eye doctor without “sunglasses” to protect your dilated eyes, which were now the size of bagels.
I was given a pair of spiffy “Solar-Rolz” Post-Mydriatic Sunglasses that you can “conveniently slip inside your normal glasses” to protect your eyes from harmful UV radiation.
It’s nice to know that after spending enough money to buy an island in the south pacific I was given such a high-quality parting gift…
Anyway, the damn Solar-Rolz were wound so tightly, that after conveniently slipping them inside of my normal glasses, they decided to try and return to their original position. Unfortunately, my face and eyes were in the way.
I then waged a desperate battle to try and save what was left of my eyes before there were sliced up by the Solar-Rolz. The battle raged for several minutes before I was rescued by a kind stranger who “thought it was odd that you were walking around slapping yourself in the head.”
I’m glad to report that 12 stitches, two jammed fingers, and one scratched cornea later I’m doing just fine…
At this point I was staggering around like a punch-drunk fighter. Fortunately I only knocked over 3 of the 17 wall-mounted display cases. Oh, and a couple of chairs in the waiting area. And possibly a plant or two…
I was then asked to pick out some frames. I’m very good at this and picked the, ahem, low-cost “Call the travel agent honey, we’re taking the kids and your mother to Europe this summer!” frames…
I figured out that buying glasses is a lot like buying cars, there is a bewildering array of options, all of which seem essential. By the time I was done, I had chosen the sun roof, the 12 speaker audio system, and the off-road package. I think somebody’s kid gets to go to Stanford because of me…
After negotiating a second mortgage with my banker I paid my bill and got ready to leave. Of course you can’t leave the eye doctor without “sunglasses” to protect your dilated eyes, which were now the size of bagels.
I was given a pair of spiffy “Solar-Rolz” Post-Mydriatic Sunglasses that you can “conveniently slip inside your normal glasses” to protect your eyes from harmful UV radiation.
It’s nice to know that after spending enough money to buy an island in the south pacific I was given such a high-quality parting gift…
Anyway, the damn Solar-Rolz were wound so tightly, that after conveniently slipping them inside of my normal glasses, they decided to try and return to their original position. Unfortunately, my face and eyes were in the way.
I then waged a desperate battle to try and save what was left of my eyes before there were sliced up by the Solar-Rolz. The battle raged for several minutes before I was rescued by a kind stranger who “thought it was odd that you were walking around slapping yourself in the head.”
I’m glad to report that 12 stitches, two jammed fingers, and one scratched cornea later I’m doing just fine…
