Tom's Trials

Signs Of Old Age

As much as I hate to admit it...I'm getting older. How do I know? I just got fitted for my first pair of bifocals. I was perfectly content with lifting my old glasses up to read the bills at restaurants. Except when I based the tip on a number that wasn't even close to what the bill said. So what! Everyone makes mistakes. Well the wife didn't share my views on this, so she made me an appointment to get my eyes checked.

Not only was I going to get new glasses, but we decided to go to a new optometrist as well. Talk about a double whammy. Well, I got my eyes tested, they even put that pupil dilating solution in my eyes so they could check out the health of my retina. Good thing the wife came along. After they administered the drops I felt like Ray Milland in "The Man With The X-Ray Eyes". I thought for sure they had mixed up the eye drops and had accidently poured gasoline into my eyes, that's how bad they burned. I knew I was in trouble when thr doctor even said "this is gonna burn a little" right before she put the drops in. Needless to say, my retina is fine, but my eyes looked like they were on fire.

About 10 days later the optometrist calls and tells me my glasses are ready for pick up. Hot Diggity, can't wait. I drive to the optometrist enjoying my last day as a one-lense-wearing man. The sky looked bluer than I remember. The colors of the passing cars stood out like an Andy Warhokl painting: super bright and vivid. As I walk into the shop, I get this uncanny feeling of dread. Like something is going to go horribly wrong. I tell the receptionist who I am and she directs me to a small table in front of the wall of frames. A thin black girl, whose name escapes me, comes over and sits down opposite me at the small table. She takes my new eyeglasses out of it's new blue leather case and proceeds to put them on my face. As soon as the glasses are seated on my nose the whole world looks like it's underwater, and that's looking through the top portion of the lense which wasn't much of a change from my old glasses. I felt something pulling on my left eye like an invisible ligament meant to turn my eyeball inward. A steady throb was building in my head. There was no way I could wear these abominations. The girl asked me how they felt and I told her that I couldn't see a thing. See grabbed them off my face, twisted the frames a little, and put them back. "How about now?" she asked, as if bending the shit out of the frames was going to somehow miraculously change the lense prescription. "I'm sorry" I said. "But these are not right. Everything is blurry." Somewhat flustered, she called over another optometrist and relayed the messgae I had just given her about my new glasses. He came over to me and said, We'll have to make another appointment to verify the prescription." I said, "OK" and followed him to the receptionist's desk.

As it turned out, they did not write down my prescription properly. They had inverted my astigmatism which is what caused the blurry vision and the pounding headache. Two tries later (that's right...TWO tries) I was fitted with a pair of glasses that I could actually see out of. I'm still getting used to having to point my nose at whatever I'm looking at, instead of moving my eyes like in the old days, but each day it gets better and better.

Pray to God I won't need trifocals! I couldn't even imagine what would happen then.