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I went to Costco for my eye exam. My daughter thought that was kind of funny. “What’s next, are you going to the grocery store for your bypass?” You’ve got to laugh when life throws you a curve, otherwise the stress will get to you.
These days it feels like we’re living in the future. However, it’s not the future from ‘The Jetsons’ where you have a robot maid and flying cars. Instead, it’s the future from ‘Blade Runner’ where everything is miserable, dark, and dirty.
Why can’t it be like ‘The Jetsons’?
In fairness to Costco, at least it was clean. When I made the appointment a month ago, they told me what to expect, but I still wasn’t prepared.
“The exam will be conducted by a technician. The optometrist will join you through video conferencing.”
“Okay, can I request he use a cat filter?”
Pause, then, “No.”
Even knowing the screen connection was coming, it still felt odd to be talking to a television.
“Hello sir!” the doctor said. He asked me how to pronounce my name. Then he looked to his other monitor and added, “It looks like you have a bit of a cataract.”
At this point I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe he’d gotten somebody else’s results. That’s the thing about technology… it glitches. When you have to introduce the element of digitizing information into a beam of light and sending it elsewhere, you have to expect some mistakes.
I didn’t say this, I just sat there with my diagnosis.
“It’s not a super big deal,” the doctor continued. “We’ll make a referral and it’s something that can be taken care of in about fifteen minutes.”
Then he said a bunch of words like “incision” and “local anesthetic” that threw me into an unpleasant daydream of potential scenarios. I started to riff on this with my daughter later on when I told her about it.
“Aw, they can’t get it done there at Costco? They aren’t going to gurney you back to the hardware department and rub some sandpaper on the back of your head?”
“Scritch, scritch, scritch,” I said. Then I added, “Yeah, I don’t like the idea of seeing some lunatic doctor come at my eyeball with a scalpel. Or maybe he’ll just stand at the other side of the room and throw darts at me, and I’ll be restrained so I’ll have to watch them come flying right at my eyeball. THUNK! Then they’ll puncture the membrane and squirt eye juice all over the place and my eye will deflate…”
“Stop it,” my wife said. “It’s done with a laser. My dad’s had the procedure a bunch of times.”
“The optometrist said scalpel.”
“Did he? Or did your overactive imagination supply that word?”
“Maybe.”
When I got home I did a search to see if stress can cause a cataract. I can’t even tell if AI is involved these days, but it seems like search engines have developed an attitude. The result I got was something like, “No, definitively not… but maybe?”
“Great, thanks a lot Skynet, you’re full of terrific ideas.”
I noticed my eye was messed up back in July when I drove my family to the airport. The good news is that my left eye still works fine. The optometrist said it’s great. In fact he said both eyes are very healthy.
“I guess I should look at the bright side,” I replied. “At least the blurriness isn’t because of a brain tumor pushing on my eyeball.”
“Nope,” the doctor said.
I saw that in a show I was watching recently. It freaked me out because the patient described all of my symptoms. To be honest, I didn’t sleep well that night. I should have watched cartoons instead. You have to be on the lookout for plot elements about brain tumors that cause blurred vision. C’mon, as if I don’t have enough to worry about.
Despite the inconclusive response I got from the killer robots running the internet, I think I’m going to blame the Republicans for this. Stress might not have caused the cataract directly, but it didn’t help. We’ve all been up to our eyeballs in misery since the spray tanned violator cheated his way back into power with the help of Mission Moderate and their band of inept defenders of the corrupt status quo.
It’s their fault. They’ve aged me a million years in the last two.
As we were finishing up the exam, the doctor said, “You’re still not legally blind.”
“What?” I replied.
“Yeah, even your right eye still sees well enough to drive.”
“Then we should put some serious consideration into changing that standard,” I said. The fact is, I’d been experimenting with driving with my right eye on the way to the exam. I thought I could practice by reading road signs on the way there. “E… K… Y… or maybe V…” But I gave it up because I quickly discovered I can’t see well enough to drive with my right eye, no matter what the law might say.
Reducing the standards to “solve” a problem is the republican way. That’s why a history of bestiality no longer disqualifies you from joining the FBI. They’re desperate for agents, but I expect this change will create more problems than it solves. How could it not? Sort of like blind drivers, but nobody asked me.
In the context of everything else, a cataract in my right eye isn’t the worst news in the world. Still, it’s sobering when you’re sitting there in the chair and the pixilated version of a doctor is looking at you from some unknown location.
“At least you still have all your hair,” my daughter said. She grabbed a handful and added, “Uh-oh.”
You have to laugh. Laughter is the best medicine. Thanks for providing me with a shoulder to cry on, and all your generous support!
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