I had to get a test for glaucoma today, so I drove down to Seattle to the Nordstrom Medical Tower and went to the twelfth floor. There was the usual peering through small holes while lights were shone in my eyes, and there various other checks, like a medical technician asking me to stare at her forehead and then count how many fingers she was holding up in the periphery of my vision.
Those things done, we moved on to putting eye drops in my eyes so they could measure the pressure.
"Oh, you’re a blinker" she said. As if it was rare that she’d encounter people who blinked when things get near their eyes.
Now, one of my superpowers is I have a fast blink reflex. It’s not a conscious act, it’s just what I do. It doesn’t have any use that I can see, apart from ruining every photo I’ve ever been in where somebody tries to use a flash. Or, when somebody tries to measure the pressure in your eyes.
The way you measure eye pressure is first to numb the eyes with eye drops, then put a probe on the eye. The tech kept telling me it wouldn’t hurt because my eyes were numb, but my eyelids didn’t know that, and we could see it coming, so try as I might I couldn’t stop blinking. She kept telling me to relax, as if that would help, and again and again I blinked. After half an hour of this nonsense we got a couple of readings, and then I went off to see the doctor.
The doctor may have had some kind of inferiority complex because he said while he could speak Greek and Latin, he’s a glorified plumber and glazier. I guess that’s the life of an opthalmic specialist.
I don’t have glaucoma, which is nice to hear. He then tried to terrify me by looking at various charts and going "good, good, good, ….(big pause) hmm" and this turned out to be because my two eyes are very different to one another. Most people have two fairly similar eyes (yay for genetics!) whereas the shape of the optic nerve in my eyes is totally different between left and right, and this looked bad. Except it didn’t, because my right optical nerve is about 40% bigger than my left, so the shape is apparently just fine.
I drove home, after dealing with the most batshit awful car parking system I’ve ever found. They give you a ticket with a phone number to text, written in writing so small that with blurry vision you can only read it with your phone magnifying it, and then when you text the number it sends you a URL to go to to pay your parking, except your phone has no reception in the parking garage, and in any case you can just pay as you leave by putting your card in the machine at the barrier, rather than accessing a website that doesn’t work even if you do have the internet. Was that an elaborate prank?
I drove home, stopping to get some CBD oil to help my wife’s back pains (and also a bag of edible THC, because she’s been asking for some, and why not take advantage of what’s legal?) and then realised my eyesight was really bad, what with my pupils being totally dilated for the examination. About seven hours later, they seem to be back to normal. Whatever normal is, eh?