Wow! Nice Uvea!
(We all do it, we all hate it. No, not flossing.)
I couldn't believe it. Had a whole year really passed? Really? But there it was – the appointment card from my eye doctor's, which brooked no argument. It was time for my annual eyeball tune-up and lube.
End of discussion. Facts are facts, unless you're a pathological liar, or in politics. (Yeah, I know.)
You know the drill. And you know you have to do it. Even if you think your eyes are fine, you know you have to go. Even if you never mistake your mom for your dad. Even if once, last month, you went a whole day without running into things. You have to honor the eye doctor's appointment card.
And you get no points at all for being able to actually read the appointment card.
You know the drill. Every year, you have to put aside a couple of hours to get your eyes checked out by a professional Eye Checker-Outer. They don't actually say "Eye Checker-Outer," or course. But for some unexplained reason, this branch of the medical profession couldn't settle for normal medical profession titles, like Dentist, or Pediatrician, or Demon Barber. So they putzed around with a Latin version of Boggle until they had enough syllables to call themselves Ophthalmologists (literal translation: Opthal Checker-Outer).
Step one, of course, once you arrive at the Opthalicron, is to peer through the little sliding-glass window at an empty check-in desk. Eventually, someone will drift past the desk, possibly by mistake, and immediately not notice you (maybe they should go get their eyes checked). After some undefined period of time, the lady (it's always a lady), who's wearing some kind of loose-fitting outfit stamped with Flintstones cartoon characters (it's always either the Flintstones or Scooby-Doo), will not look directly at you and ask you if your insurance has changed.
Your insurance status is what defines what will happen, or won't happen, next. Your insurance status is more important than incidental trivia like your name, how your kids are doing in school, or the fact that you're bleeding freely from the forehead and holding your detached left leg in your right arm.
It doesn't help matters, either, that Flintstone Lady always seems just a tiny bit bitter (perhaps due to having made a career choice that involves going to lunch five days a week with other ladies, all wearing loose-fitting Flintstone pajamas).
Anyway, after you've scribbled through the formalities, Flintstone Lady ushers you into the examining chamber, a dimly-lit windowless room inevitably decorated, like all medical and dental facilities, in a neutral-colors theme so foul that you can actually buy it at Home Depot, should you have such an aberrant urge (just ask for Early Appalachian Orthodontia). This color scheme is the result of years of secret CIA research in psychological warfare, designed to turn the targeted human into a pliant dweeb who will numbly accept commands like "Yes, everything but your underwear" and "Okay, now spit."
There's something about that chair in the eye doctor's examining room that makes the visitor feel like an undersized space alien, about to be questioned or … gulp … probed. You're sitting there in the semi-darkness, surrounded by lots of looming, off-white machinery, as if you'd been kidnapped and spirited off to some sort of evil Swivel Museum.
After tapping a computer keyboard for a while, Flintstone Lady felt her way over to my ecto-chair and, with no explanation whatsoever, handed me a preparatory Kleenex. She began to manipulate the machine's eerily organic elements, all of which required me to "rest your chin here," a phrase I haven't heard since watching a very dismal Lifetime Channel mini-series about the French Revolution.
For a while, we played some kind of weird game where she Gatling-gunned slides at me and kept yelling, "Better? Or worse?"
I never did find out my score.
Finally, Flintstone Lady zapped me with a three-gallon dose of eye drops, turned on a little projector, and made me read very tiny, incredibly misspelled words.
This is it? This is the pinnacle of progress in medical science? You're sitting in a dark closet with a mildly bitter adult. Your eyes are dripping some kind of eye-drop residue the consistency of queso and the color of three-week-old sun-dried ferret. And you're being forced to recite words like "LZ3VRTSX" to a professional wearing pajamas.
By the time Flintstone Lady's silhouette made her exit, my eyes looked like an Audrey Hepburn movie poster. I was so dilated I was afraid I might go into labor.
In spite of it all, though, going to the eye doctor's office beats going to the "full-body-contact" doctor's office in three important ways. Firstly, you don't have to get weighed. Secondly, you don't have to take off all your clothes, put on a gown that would show off your cleavage if your cleavage was on your back, and sit, shivering, on a roll of generic gift-wrapping paper.
The other advantage of visiting the eye doctor's is a conspicuous absence of specimen cups. If you're ever at an eye doctor's office, and any Scooby-Doo'd staffer hands you a specimen cup, you should demand to see some ID. Or just tell them you have no insurance.
Finally, the doctor himself, the actual Optimal Thologist, decided to dropped by. He asked how my insurance was doing; had I experienced any blurred vision; had I noticed any running into poles and nearby people.
I did get some good news, though. I think. I'm not sure, because by this point the eye drops were puddling in my ears, but I think the eye doc said I might get an early Cadillac.
Then he handed me a bill for the Kleenex, opened the closet door, and disappeared into a halo of light.
Minutes passed. Machinery hummed. A speaker in the ceiling looped through bad orchestral arrangements of Neil Diamond tunes, but I was too dilated to escape. In my mind, I began to organize my last will and testament. I calmed my soul.
Not to worry. Flintstones Lady finally re-materialized and outfitted me with an embarrassingly cheesy, eclipse-ready, dark-glasses device – a temporary, die-cut piece of light-defying plastic that was supposed to cling to my glasses and protect my poor, dilated eyeballs from sunlight, as long as I avoided sunlight.
The faux glasses did not deliver – I merely transitioned from living in a blurred world to living in a blurred world that was also dark. All the glasses did was restrain me from cursing at daylight, while simultaneously making me look like Will Smith playing Ray Charles, but less rich.
I couldn't focus, I couldn't drive, and I was costumed like Helen Keller playing Will Smith, but less rich. So, for the rest of morning, I sat on a bench outside the office, holding a specimen cup and singing the blues.
Not a bad morning, as it turned out. I pulled down twenty-eight bucks.
That'll almost cover the Kleenex.
