When My Visit to the Eye Doctor Got Really Dark
Something was up when my optometrist paused during my eye exam, studied whatever she had been scribbling, scrunched her face, and announced, “I’ll be back in a few minutes. We’re going to have a short intermission.” She collected her notes and hurried out of the room.
As a kid, I subscribed to the notion that only long, boring movies with sad endings had intermissions: Gone with the Wind, The Godfather, Gandhi, Lawrence of Arabia. If any of those films foreshadowed the outcome of my eye exam-turned-saga, I wanted a new screenwriter.
The exam hadn’t been a bed of roses. I arrived knowing I would likely need a new reading prescription because reading lately has been strenuous. “Can you read these letters for me?” asked Dr. L.
“C, H, O…um…K? Or R maybe?”
“Good,” she said. When she opened both lenses on the oger-like autorefractor, I saw neither a K nor an R, but rather a P.
My faulty readings increased as I misidentified letters like a nervous witness misidentifying a criminal in a line-up. And I was getting more anxious with each click of that monstrous machine. “Which looks clearer–lens one or two?”
“They look the same.”
“Okay. How about two or three?”
“No difference.”
“Okay. Wait one moment,” she said, following a rapid succession of clicks. “How about lens nine or ten?”
Nine or ten? What happened to five, six, seven, and eight? Nine and ten were clearer than one through three. Ten was clearer than nine. And I was clear that my eyes were already in Coke bottle lens territory. My saga was devolving into a tragedy.
When Dr. L returned from “intermission,” my legs jittered like a bag of frogs.
“Let’s try something here,” she said as she pushed aside the autorefractor and gently coaxed in a more miniature horror with a single bright light aimed at my eyes. Now, keep your eyes wide open and look over here,” she said, pointing toward a rectangular attachment behind the light. My eyelids fluttered as I looked into the creature’s eye.
“Hmm. You have cornea erosion in both eyes. And its shape means you’re either not closing your eyes completely when you blink or sleep. I’m going to prescribe you some gel eyedrops.”
She delivered the news like a forecaster reporting the weather.
“I might be sleeping with my eyes open?” I asked incredulously, as I had never heard of such a thing. It sounded bizarre, but as I thought about it, I hadn’t slept well because it was a heat-wave summer with eighty-degree nights and creepy spiders squeezing through window screens and invading my bed. And as I always say about spiders: Unless your name is Charlotte and you’re writing fantastic headlines about me on your web, you have no business in my home. So maybe I was sleeping with my eyes slightly open, keeping watch for unwanted guests.
Dr. L glanced at the single-eye monster as if consulting with it via telepathy. “Yes,” she said, “But these gel drops will help protect your cornea. Drop one dose per eye before bedtime.”
And that was that.
Before leaving her office, I took a copy of my new prescriptions and glanced at the treacherous machinery flanking the hot seat where I had been trapped for fifteen minutes. Like Scylla and Charybdis, they guarded the gateway to twenty-twenty vision. Unfortunately, my eyes didn’t pass the narrow strait and became their latest casualty.
But this doesn’t have to be the final ending. My visit to the eye doctor can be the first installment of a trilogy, in which I return to face the autorefractor and embark on a mission toward laser surgery. Or I might begin a quest seeking the true meaning of clear vision. Eyesight is the physical aspect of vision, but consciousness is its spiritual counterpart. What is my vision for myself and my life? Do I see the world through a blurred lens or a clear lens? And how are my eyeglasses prescription an extension of my spiritual vision?
Those answers and more are coming soon to a screen near you.
For more essays like “When My Visit to Eye Doctor Got Really Dark,” visit ZayZoh.com.
.
