The indignity....

Several years ago, my ex-boss, who had then just turned forty, was quite perturbed to find that she was holding things farther and farther away in order to read them. Finally, she’d had enough and went to the eye doctor. She emerged slightly depressed, with a prescription for reading glasses.

I, on the other hand, who’d been wearing glasses since I was six for close, far, and any kind of paranormal visual needs I might have needed, felt slightly smug. Well. At least there was one indignity of aging that I would be spared. My eyesight was already ruined.

I felt smug about this until a couple of months ago. When I started wondering why those sneaky typographers were making text for labels smaller and smaller. It must have been some kind of conspiracy. Or a way ad agency graphic artists (most of whom are twenty-something graduates from Rhode Island School of Design) could get back at the older generation for things like the national debt and the need for safe sex and the upping of the drinking age.

Because it couldn’t be my eyes. Because any kind of kindly fate or goddess or the freakin’ luck of the draw wouldn’t be so cruel as to give me just one more health issue to deal with right now.

Either way, the whole thing was starting to bug me. To read the lists of ingredients on some packages, to read drug package inserts, anything smaller than nine point type, I had to bring it right up to my nose and lift off my glasses in order to see it. And there was a new one for me. Taking my glasses off in order to see something better.

So finally I gave in. I went for my eye exam this week. It had been a few years, and I’d forgotten the procedure. I knew my eyes would have to be dilated and I’d need a ride home, but as far as I remembered, this was only because it made them more sensitive to light and perhaps I wouldn’t want to be driving.

First, the pre-exam. Read this line, read that line, which is better, version 1 or version 2; version 4 or version 5, the rules of baseball as originally written or as amended to include artificial turf and the designated hitter?

Then the drops.

Then I was sent into the “dilation room” in order to wait for the drops to take effect. The dilation room was nothing more than an alcove in a hallway running between the waiting room and the examination rooms (this is a very large ophthalmologist’s group). The alcove contained a large, sunny window (thanks, guys), a row of uncomfortable seats and a vertical rack of some really cool and actually current magazines, but due to the drops, as I was quickly finding out, none of which I was able to read. Neither could I do much with the copy of the New York Times someone had left behind, or the book on Zen philosophy I’d brought in case I found myself sitting around a waiting room.

I’d forgotten about the part where the drops really screw up your vision. So I held the Times up at arms’ length and skimmed the headlines, and paced back and forth in the small alcove, feeling inappropriately jealous of husband, who was sitting in an uncomfortable chair smugly reading the biography of Ben Franklin he’d brought, and apparently, from his absorption, was either able to see every word or was simply ignoring me.

Finally my name was called. “Good,” I said. “Because I can’t read or see and I probably look pretty stoned by now.”

For some reason the other patients and the staff found this funny.

“What did I say?” I asked husband.

“Apparently,” he said, guiding his blind wife by one elbow, “you still have a sense of humor.”

So then I waited for Diane, my ophthalmologist, I like her. I’ve been going to her for years. She’s a willowy blonde with a whiskey voice who knows her stuff and doesn’t waste time. She did two minor surgeries of my right eyelid over the past fifteen years or so and did a damned good job. So I still like her when she breezes in, scans my test results and says that although I do need a change in prescription, I won’t need additional glasses for reading, nor bifocals.

Then she looks at my eyes. “You’re, what, 44 now?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And you wouldn’t be starting menopause by any chance?”

Crap. “Unfortunately,” I said.

“And you cry a lot?”

Damn. And I’m thinking epithets much stronger. Do the tears leave a stain down my cheeks? Can everyone see them? I sigh, then nod.

“Well, that’s one good case of dry eye,” she says. “The tears are washing away the normal lubrication and it’s like you’re seeing out of a cracked windshield. So you’re going to have to wait on the new glasses until we get you treated.”

I get drops. I get prescriptions. I’m told to try flax seed oil. I get appointment in six weeks, and if not better by then, I get the heavy stuff. Some new prescription drops that are expensive but supposed to work wonders.

Then I’m dismissed to the check-out desk, with my goodie bag of samples and prescriptions and directions. Fortunately, the directions are printed in very large type that won’t require me to remove my glasses. Unfortunately, I can’t see well enough to write the check for the co-pay.

I hope I got everything in the right place.

“How long do these drops last?” I ask.

“Four to six hours,” the receptionist says.

This is not acceptable. I will have a headache long before then.

“But there are reversing drops. Some people don’t like them because they sting for a second.”

I stared at her. Sting. For a second. Hah. Obviously she doesn’t know who she’s dealing with. I’m not some piker. You don’t know the meaning of the word sting until you’ve had anesthesia injected into your eyelid. Not just once, but twice. Or had a doctor stick his thumbs into your herniated disk and ask if it hurt. Or…

“Rack ‘em up, honey,” I said. “I think I can handle it.”