Saturday morning The Wife™ and I had optometrist appointments because she is blind I’m, well, I’m just plain dumb. I hadn’t had my eyes checked in over eight years yet recently have found myself sitting so close to my gigantic monitor at work that I can count individual pixels. So yea, you could say it was about time I get that looked at.
Going into it I was totally freaked out. Eyes are a big deal to me. I’m idiotically proud of the fact that I have better than 20/20 vision and in a room of twenty people I’m usually the only one without glasses or contacts. My eyesight is precious to me, and I was really dreading having some douchebag with an MD tell me that I needed to join the rank and file of those with visual assistance. ‘Cuz you know an optometrist doesn’t wear glasses. Smug bastards.
Little did I know that when you go to the eye doctor, it’s akin to stepping back in time, into a historical vortex if you will, that drops you back into the Middle Ages. Contraptions and whizzgigs with metal prongs sticking up everywhere. Head braces and chin rests galore. A veritable torture museum I tell you. And this one machine? Yea, they’re all like “put your eye right up to it, it’ll be fine!” and then they’re all like, BAM! TAKE THIS CONCENTRATED AIR INTO YOUR EYEBALL. Hello? What the hell is that? I was *this* close to walking out after that deal breaker.
Anyway, after they poured hydrochloric acid into my eyeballs gave me eye drops to dilate my pupils, they sent me back to the waiting room for 15 minutes. The Wife™ was off getting her coke bottles adjusted so I passed the time by gazing out the windows, focusing on things far away. And when I happened to look down to my watch, I realized that this bastard doctor had pulled a fast one on me and caused me to go blind. I had a mini freak-out, you could say. My vision was gone. I couldn’t see a damned thing, except excessive blurriness. I was convinced that this douchebag with and MD had screwed up and given me battery acid the wrong drops and that this time, I actually was going to be blinded for life.
And then I remembered that he said things might be a tad bit fuzzy for a few hours. A shame he didn’t qualify “tad bit fuzzy” as being “equivalent to smearing Vaseline on your eyeballs.”
So I calmed down, knowing I hadn’t lost my precious gift of sight. He eventually told me that I could have glasses if I wanted them, with a whopping 0.25 prescription. The Wife™ and I checked out and on the walk to the car she confided that they must have put her contacts in wrong.
“Why? Do you need to go back in?”
“No, it’s fine. I just can’t really see.”
“Um, you know your eyes are supposed to be fuzzy, right? From the drops?”
“Really? They didn’t tell me that. I’ve been coming here for years and they’ve never told me that! I thought I was going blind for some reason.”
[silence]
“Duh! What kind of moron would think that they were going blind? Talk about being overly-dramatic. Sheesh, you women…”
And so my self-righteous indignation and I drove off, narrowing avoiding hitting every car on the way home.
