The Eyes Are the Window to the Soul, or Something

Eye doctor equipment inspired by Disney Pixar’s “Wall E”

Welcome to the eye doctor! Hard to believe it’s been a whole year. My, how you’ve grown slightly bigger, and aged! I know you enjoy going through life using your corrective lenses and pretending to be just like everyone else, but here at the eye doctor we feel it’s important to remind you at least once a year that you are, as the kids say, “nearsighted af.”

Let’s start in this room with me, a person whose title will forever be a mystery. Am I a Registered Nurse? A Physician’s Assistant? A receptionist from the temp agency? That is for me to know and you to not know, ever.

I (whoever the heck I am lol) will now ask you the first set of questions that you will just make up the answers to, including “how often do you change your lenses, do you ever sleep in your lenses, and what brand of solution do you use?”

Keep in mind that you will be summarily thrown out into the gutter if the answers to these questions even approximate “I change them whenever they are so covered with crud they are rendered opaque, sometimes I fall asleep in them, hee hee, why, is that bad, and how tf should I know the name of my contact solution, it is literally saltwater.” It should be noted that “just use my answers from last year” is also an unacceptable answer for which you will be judged.

Let’s proceed to the part where you have to take out your contacts and really come to grips with your visual situation. We enjoy seeing our patients go from “I’m winning at life,” to “I’m that old man from The Twilight Zone who survives nuclear annihilation only to break his glasses and be condemned to a life of misery.” We believe humility is an important step in acceptance, which is an important step in our secret plan to overthrow the government and install an optometric dictator, wait, I mean eye health.

The world is over and you can't see. Womp Womp.

Now that you are staring blankly ahead and awkwardly not seeing anything, I will leave you alone with your thoughts while you wait for the doctor. We have a fantastic selection of magazines for you to not read while you wait!  

Hi there, I’m the eye doctor. I hope your favorite thing is when an old man turns all the lights off and sticks his face millimeters from yours while shining laser pointers into your eyeballs!

After that, I will pull this old-timey contraption up to your face and make you look through different lenses and tell me which letters you see. Then I will slightly change the lenses and ask you which of two lenses is more clear, one or two (sometimes I will use different numbers, with no detectable pattern in my number choice). Most of the time the two lenses will look exactly the same to you and you will just randomly pick one, growing ever more anxious as you make up more and more answers and dig yourself into a hole of pure lies. One or two? Two or three? Three or four? Sixteen or Thirty-two? π or θ?

This will last for 550 minutes or until numbers and letters begin to look like meaningless symbols, (whichever comes first) and then the Fun Train will keep on chugging down to pupil dilation! This is where we drop some brackish yellow burny stuff in your eyes and make you wait some more while you look at blurry pictures in People Magazine or just hang out with your own relentlessly unhelpful thoughts.  

I heard through the grapevine that you have astigmatism.

​Then we shine some more laser pointers into your eyeballs, after which you finally get to go out in public, wearing disposable sunglasses that look like something that would happen if the California Raisins and your grandma designed eyewear together.

You have now completed your eye doctor visit. Go out into the unbearable sunlight, dear patient, with your keepsake glasses, your scarily-dilated pupils, and your ego squashed back down to a healthy size. “See” you next year bwahahahaha!