The Eye Doctor

Not once in my life have I willingly stepped into an optometrist's, begging for (and paying for) an eye exam. Growing up with notoriously bad eyesight has given me a Pavlovian response to eye doctors: Every time I enter a spectacles shop, I swear I still hear the exasperated sigh of my mother, worried and frustrated about my increasing short-sightedness. Other kids hide report cards, I hide letters from my school requesting me to go for eye check-ups. (Not saying that I don't hide report cards. I've been falsifying report cards using photoshop, printing it on official school paper with the relevant letterheads and giving that to my parents to sign since I was a wee little kid. But that's another deviously evil story for another time.)

The US has the weirdest laws. Case in point: In the state of Wisconsin, it is illegal to serve apple pies in restaurants without cheese. Another example: It is illegal for vendors to sell contact lenses without a doctor's prescription. And what does a doctor's prescription cost in the US, when it is offered as a completely free service in Singapore? A whopping $105, just for a guy (who isn't even in a white doctor's coat, I might add) to tell you something you already know. I used to just circumvent this utterly pointless procedure by ordering my contact lenses directly from the UK, but dire circumstances involving my last two pairs of daily contacts forced my hand. With great reluctance, I scheduled an appointment with an optometrist to have my eyes looked at. 

My main source of reluctance wasn't actually paying the fee, it was the fear of hearing more bad news from the doctor. The 'little red house on a green hill' that you have to focus on through that machine has been haunting me for more than ten years, and I hated having to pay for that ordeal again. Fuck the little red house and fuck its magical focusing and unfocusing trick. 

"How does this ... compare to this ..." The optometrist dials his alien ware left and right. I despised his chart full of random letters and I despised his condescending tone. "Ooh, you were using the same degree when your eyes are not of the same degree! Ooh, you're screwing up your eyes by doing that!" What a know-it-all. 

He should really be more specific with his questions too. "What's the difference between these two?"

"Well, the light diffuses in a way that makes it appear more aura-ly," I elaborate. 

"Just ... tell me if it's clearer or more blurry." He sighs. Well excuse me for trying to give you a more concrete answer. You should really be catering to preschoolers if that's the caliber of answers you're looking for, doctor-man. I squirm uncomfortably in his 'big-chair', as he calls it (probably a medical term), craning my neck to look through the eye holes of the device that's clearly positioned too low for me, straining to guess the row of gibberish.

"P, Q, T, 2, %, #, @ ... ?" Nope, he wants me to try again.

"I, D, K, L, O, L?" I didn't think so. He's getting impatient and starts looking at his wristwatch. The final contact lenses he ends up giving me may or may not be randomly grabbed from a nearby shelf. If there's one thing I'm getting out of this is that I should definitely consider becoming an optometrist myself if this is all there is to it. 

As it turns out, I needed slightly different powers for both my eyes, a bit higher for my left and a bit lower for my right, but was using the average power of both my eyes in the past. Does that really harm my eyes? Who can really say, for sure. What I was doing in the past definitely makes sense mathematically. The plus side is, I no longer have to put myself through that again, now that I have a US doctor's approval (however much that's worth) to purchase contacts. Awesome, now I'm free to finger and poke my eyes however I wish to.