In Which I Can See Clearly Now

So this morning I dropped Connor off at school, ran a couple of errands and then saw the eye doctor. 

I was, long, long overdue for an appointment; I was down to my last pair of my emergency stash of contacts and my glasses are ten years old.  I tend to put making appointments for myself into the same category as shopping for shoes; it's just about the lowest priority and I only do it when things are falling apart.  I don't recommend this as an appropriate health care regime.  The one exception to this is my yearly well check with my primary care manager, which I do every year because she's the same doctor that Connor sees and I feel guilty every time we go in and see her if I'm overdue for an appointment.  Never underestimate the power of a good guilt trip.

Anyway, since this is a new eye doctor for me and I hadn't been to see anybody in Far Too Long, they ran me through the full gamut of tests.  They also did this because all kinds of nasty eye issues run in my family in addition to the whole being mostly blind without correction thing, they wanted to get some good baselines in case my eyes decide to explode or something another fifteen or twenty years down the line. 

So they did that test where they puffed air at my eye and I jumped a foot in my seat despite them telling me fifteen seconds before that they were about to puff air in my eye, and the one where I had to press a button every time these weird little squares blinked on and off, and various other fun little things meant to put my eyes through their paces.  I am now the proud owner of a glorious shot of the backs of my eyes, which I would totally frame and put on my mantle or something if it wasn't a bit egotistical.  I have very photogenic eye innards. 

That's not the only thing I'm good at either-- apparently I'm a paragon of decisiveness when it comes to the part where you have to "pick which is better: one or two" about fifty different times.  Considering the sheer amount of time it takes for Jeremy and I to figure out where the heck we're going to go on a date (wherever you want to go, honey!) this is nothing short of amazing.  The doctor actually praised me for my prompt decision making skills, so evidently I have a hidden talent.  A very deeply hidden talent useful for nothing other than visits to the eye doctor, but still, a talent is a talent.

So as it turns out my eyes have managed to get both simultaneously better and worse.  My eyesight has gone from Horribly, Horribly Nearsighted to Slightly Less Horribly But Still Really Horribly Nearsighted.  However, I now have astigmatism in both eyes, and the left one is shaped enough like a football that it needs a special contact for correction.  Huzzah!

So I walked out with a new pair of contacts that would hopefully help me with things like actually being able to read street signs again, and an order for a pair of glasses, which I should get in another eight to ten days.  I'll wear the contacts for a couple of weeks and then go back in for another appointment to make sure that they're working well and, if so, to order a larger supply.  It was a little difficult to tell right off the bat how well they were working though, because they had to dilate my eyes due to that whole Way Too Long Since Your Last Eye Doctor Appointment thing.

For some reason my eyes have always reacted relatively strongly to those dilating eye drops; I know they're supposed to wear off after about three hours but my pupils finally returned completely to normal around six hours after my appointment.  When I was a teenager they would sometimes last for over a day.  Even more bizarrely the drops would affect one eye more than the other.  After a few hours I would end up with one normal sized pupil and one huge pupil, making me look like I had suffered severe head trauma.  Fun! 

Nothing like that happened this time, which I was slightly disappointed about.  Instead I just spent half the day being that weird chick who wears her dark sunglasses indoors.  Oh well.

~Jess