My eye appt.
I just finished my last post when I remembered this. I went to the eye doctor yesterday for my final check-up. Something about making sure my retina hadn’t detached. Spsh! Yeah. Whatever. Anyway, so I was expecting this to be a quick visit to just take a look in my eye and send me on my merry way. Haha! Now, would I be blogging this if that were the case? A nurse brought me to an exam room and checked the pressure in my eye and my vision out of that eye. No big deal, except for the fact that she acted like she had absolutely no clue what was going on. She couldn’t get the little pressure thing to work. What they do is numb your eye and tap your eyeball with this little pen-sized electrical gizmo. You can’t feel it, but it looks really weird. And I’m sure your eye gets tired of it real fast. Well, she tapped my eyeball for a little while trying to get a reading, didn’t get a reading that seemed right, then kept tapping my eye until she got a reading she liked! It didn’t take long and didn’t hurt my eye at all, but it was just weird! Then, she left, came back a little while later, and asked us to follow her to another exam room because they needed the one we were in. Ok. S, we sat in that room for a while. Then, another nurse came and asked us to wait in the waiting area because they needed that room, too. Finally, we got to see the doctor. But they had to spray some deodorizer in the room before we went in because the lady in front of us smelled really bad. And I guess she had the type of funk that lingered. Well, we were sitting in the room waiting for an austere, graying doctor that had examined me the time before to come in. This is a University clinic and you never know what you’re going to get, but whatever it is, it usually has a student in tow that does everything over again after the real doctor’s already done it. I got a 30-something female doctor who looked somewhat like Dr. Montgomery from Grey’s Anatomy, but I’m not really sure because she walked in the room and was instantly talking and messing with whatever instrument she was about to shove into my eye. Actually, I think she was talking to me before she even opened the door. Oh, wait. The door was already open for ventilation purposes. Well, before she even came around the corner then. All right, let’s have a little exercise in “speech style visualization.” If you could write like Dr. Austere Gray,he would read something like this: Hello, my name is Dr. Gray. I changed my name when my hair started turning this lovely mix of platinum, aluminum and freshly-machined steel. Let’s take a look at that eye. blahblahblah. End Gray’s blabbering. Now, if you could write like Dr. Montgomery Wannabe, it would read something like this: *slightly high pitched and fast and mumbly* himynameisdrwannabeandwe’regonnabestickingthisthinginyoureyebutdon’tworrybrcausewe’llputenoughnumbingdropsinyoureyetomakethemstingreallybadforthenextseveralhoursandblahblahblah
Catch any of that? No, neither did I. I just nodded and smiled. Ok, so that’s what she talked like. Now, here’s what she did. Remember, the whole time she’s talkingtalkingtalking. First, she had me tilt my head back to put numbing drops in my eye. You’re probably only supposed to get 1 or maybe 2 in your eye. I think she was too impatient for the whole eye dropper thing and just took the cap off and poured the stuff in my face. Literally, it was running down my face. I HAD SOME ON MY FOREHEAD! Way up there, too. I was shocked. Then, she whips around, neglects to give me a tissue to keep this stuff from running down my face, and says, “you’ll probably feel some stinging.” Little did I know she meant FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE! So, then, she sits in the chair across from me and pulls the little instrument table between us. You know, the little table with the really bright light that they use to look into your eye. Which is exactly what she used it for. Except this time, instead of just looking into my eye, she used this strange little device that (I’m guessing) let her look at the sides of the inside of my eye just by spinning it (along the same lines as a periscope) rather than having me look in all sorts of directions. Sounds harmless, right? It wasn’t too bad unless you like having something liberally coated in a thick gel pressed directly against your eyeball for a couple minutes. It wasn’t painful, but getting that gel out of your eye took some time. Oh, so she did my left eye first to have something to compare my right eye to. As soon as she got done, I started grinding on my eye with a tissue while she was putting more gel on the little scope thing for my right eye. Then, she finished with my right eye and turned around, and I was about to start digging at my right eye when she said, “You can blot your eye, but it’s not a good idea to rub it because it’s numbed.” And I thought, “Now you tell me.” So, between the numbing drops and the gel, my eyes were watering for a solid hour afterwards, I could hardly open them for half an hour, and they stung noticeably until we went to bed. And Faith had to drop me off to pick up my car at work. Fortunately, there was a Mexican restaurant right next to work that we stopped and had supper at. If it weren’t for that, I would’ve had some serious problems driving home. So, the moral of the story is: What doesn’t kill you will probably make your life just that much harder. 
