Eye Dunno

For the past few days I’ve had an eye chart in my room. My mom is cleaning out her nurse's office and the first thing to wind up in my bedroom is the official eye exam chart. It’s the one with the E’s facing different directions though, instead of the letters. This is to not confuse the kid with poor vision who never made it past LMNOP. Every morning/afternoon/late afternoon I wake up, I gave myself a little test run. Turned out my vision was slipping. And it’s still hard to make the backwards E with your hand.

So I set up an appointment and went in today. First thing any doctor does is make you wait in the waiting room. Then you see the nurse, who gets the ball rolling on the mini-gauntlet, this time for your eyes. Read this, look there, cover that, read that backwards, tell me when point A passes through point B, push this button, open your eyes real wide, and blur your eyes a little, look at this picture, and tell me if you see a spaceship.

Then you take the glaucoma test. And what better way to test for something wrong with your eye than to blow a strong puff of air directly into it. "How's your stomach feeling today, Mr. Robinson?" Wham. Gut punch.

I knew it was coming. My eyes started to water just walking into that room. Because of that test, I can actually cry on cue. Says it right there on my resume. So it’s a little tough for me to sit perfectly still with my eye wide open, waiting to be shot in the eye at point blank range. She’s on the other side of the machine guiding the air assault. She smirks as she locks the target and squeezes the trigger. This is her favorite part of the day. Beep. Adjust. Beeeeep. Adjust. Beep. Adjust. Beeep. Beep. Oh god, it burns. Ok, now the other eye.

When the doctor finally came in, boy was I embarrassed when I wasn’t wearing any pants. Apparently they don’t do that. After I "repantsed," he checked me over and promptly told me I wasn’t going to be piloting jet fighters any time soon. Which is fine, really, because I’m more of a Goose than a Maverick.

The optometrist recommended I have my eyes dilated for further inspection. And who am I to argue, I can barely see him without his help. Dilated is a word referring to the widening of something, usually pupils and cervixes. Fortunately it was my eyes that were getting the drops. Unfortunately this meant my pupils were going to be the size of coat buttons and any natural light was going to make me curl up in the fetal position. When the nurse came in later to check how far I was dilated, she said, “You’ve got more black in your eyes than blue.” I winked at her, just to let her know I could do that too.

Another reason for my visit was to get some replacement lenses for my glasses. It might have been easier to hand those over had I remembered to bring them in from the car. It also might have been a good idea to retrieve those BEFORE I had my eyes dilated. So not only was I making this treacherous trip sans any sort of corrective lenses, but now if I look even remotely in the direction of the sun, I’m going to become even blinder, thus negating the last half hour of torture.

I pressed the ground floor button in the elevator with my nose since I was already that close. I said hello to someone as I left the building, though it could have been a coat rack. And I relied on the remaining four senses to navigate my way across the parking lot. I could have been mugged with a ballpoint pen and I wouldn’t have been able to tell you if it was a man or a woman. A police portrait of the perpetrator would have consisted of me etch-a-sketching out a generic face for a few minutes and then shaking it up a little to blur the edges. I couldn’t tell the police if he got away in a Miata or a Roman chariot, much less tell them the license plate. But somehow I made it through it alive, glasses in hand, back to the office… of the people next door.

My mom also had an appointment today. Checked, air cannoned, and dilated. Which meant one of us was going to have to drive home. I had never actually used the phrase “the blind leading the blind” so literally before, but here I was, presented with that very situation. Have you ever seen Scent of a Woman, where the very blind character played by Al Pacino learns how to drive a car? And next to him, a young Chris O' Donnell watches in horror as the scene unfolds. Now imagine little Charlie being blind himself, riding sidecar while Pacino barrels down the streets in a “luxury sport utility vehicle.” Ok, so we weren’t totally blind, but without the use of the fancy roll-up sunblockers provided by the doctor I wouldn’t have been able to keep my eyes from searing in the sun. My mom, taking it easy knowing that her vision is more than impaired, pulls immediately out onto the feeder in front of a car and says, “Sorry, but I can’t see” to the guy she cuts off.

We managed to make it home safely. And when my vision finally cleared up and I was able to get back in front of that eye chart in my room... I could see through it.