The Eye Doctor

Today I went to the eye doctor.

It's not my first experience. I have been going since I was in sixth grade. The first time I went to the eye doctor I almost passed out from the stress. They don't call it an eye EXAM for no reason. It's a stinkin test...and you pay for it! So the first time I went, I SOO didnt want my eyes to be bad. I was so nervous when the lady asked me to read the letters. I didnt want to be wrong. I didnt want to disappoint her.

...But I was wrong. I had to get glasses. That meant I had to keep going to the eye doctor and take this "exam" every year. i thought I was going to get uclers.

So every time I went to the eye doctor a wave of nervousness came over me. I hated hearing that my eyes got worse. I hated putting my eye up to a machine and the lady saying, "don't blink" knowing you were about to get a puff of air in your eye. You see the PURPOSE of blinking is to keep stuff like that out. God designed our eyes so that we would blink in those situations. So basically she is asking you to go against your natural design...its just not right.

But I dont have glacoma...so that is a positive.

Another point of stress is the peripheral vision test. You have to stare at this black square and hit a button every time you see a flicker on the machine. I get so scared that I am going to miss a flicker if I blink and they will think I can see out of my peripheries, so I sit there keeping my eye's plastered open, so they dry out, get blurry and then I get worried that I can't distinguish the blurry from the flicker. I am pretty sure I must have failed this before, but they probably have just not wanted to brake the news to me...

One visit I asked the doctor, "so you know how perfect eyes are 20/20, what are my eyes?" He looked at me and said, "Sara, our machines only measure up to 20/800, meaning that what normal people can read at 800 ft away, you would have to stand 20 ft away...well your eyes are worse than that. We cant really measure where you are at...you are off the charts.

And while being "off the charts" is all well and good when you are talking about IQ, its really not a claim to fame at the eye doctor.

So after that visit i decided I didnt need to worry about reading the letters correctly off the chart.

But for some reason, even though I was basically blind the nurse lady still made me take off my glasses and try to read the chart. She would put one row up on the screen and ask me to say it. I would kindly tell her, "I can't even see letters". Then she would put the biggest thing they had and ask me to read it. In my mind I am thinking "remember now I am trying to basically reading a sign that is 800 feet a way...why is she making me do this!" I am blind! I admit it! Please just dont make me read these letters! So anything she put up there I would tell her, "i am sorry, I cant read that."

...her response..."REALLY?!?" I thought to myself, hey I am putting food on your table with these eyes...I would be a little kinder to them!

But now they don't make me do this anymore. Heck, they don't even let me walk by myself without my glasses anymore. Which is a good thing, because after the nurse led me out of the room today, I almost sat on a man's lap because I couldn't tell that there was someone sitting there until I got right up close to him...whoa it was almost bad!

The one glimer of hope in all of this is my pupils. For some reason, God has giving me supernatural amazing pupils. Some people are star athletes, some people are world-renown cooks, I on the other hand have no-need-to-be-dialated-pupils. According to my doctor, my pupils are so big that he can easily see into my eyes. A couple years ago, he told me I had large pupils so instead of dialating every two years on me, he would do every 3 years. This year as he is looking into my eyes (in a completely unromantic sort of way) he exclaims, "Man your pupils are amazing! I can see so well! I might never need to dialate you again!" so right then I decided that the next time I am sitting in a circle and someone asks the question, "what is on interesting fact about you" I am going to tell them, "i have extremely large pupils." That should be a crowd pleaser!

So aside from the puff of air, the stressful test, and the periphery test that makes me want to pluck my eyeballs out...I learned that I have a unique pupil gift...and that is enough peace of mind to keep me going back to the eye doctor!