I've had to wear my glasses a lot over the last few months. My contacts were making my eyes itchy, irritated, and I think they may have given me temporary X-ray vision, which is not as cool as it sounds because it irradiated my retinas.So rather than feel the burning and itching that can only come with extended contact wear or gonorrhea, I decided to wear my stylish glasses. For reasons I can't fully explain, my glasses seem to have a very scholarly appearance. At least, I think I look smarter when I'm wearing them.
Maybe I need a bushy beard to pull off the look rather than the slovenly five o'clock shadow that I'm sporting in that fine photograph. I don't mind wearing my glasses all that much, but I think I look better with contacts, so I made an appointment with my friendly neighborhood Kittanning optometrist. Believe it or not, he's actually a legitimate optometrist, and his tests involve something a bit more sophisticated than prodding me in the eye with a sharp stick.It turns out that I had inflamed eyes from wearing my contacts too much. He told me to wear my glasses for a week and put medicated eye drops in my eyes four times a day. I thanked him and went about my business, but the more I thought about it, the more annoyed I became. The last time I was there, he gave me special "Day and Night" contacts that could supposedly be worn for 30 days straight without having to take them out. Nevertheless, I took them out every night because I don't like to have my contacts in when I sleep. I have this paranoid fear that my contacts will roll behind my eyeballs when I'm sleeping if I leave them in too long. But if the damn things could be in my eyes for a month straight, and I was wearing them for half that time, what was wrong with the people who actually wore them all that time? Are there people running around with their eyes on fire and bleeding from their pupils?
In any case, he told me to come in two weeks later so that he can make sure everything cleared up. He told me to use the drops for a week, and then wear these new contacts for a week. The new contacts were awesome. I haven't known comfort like that since I discovered the crotch-level water jets at the local pool when I was six. They even came with a special case that would clean the contacts by soaking them in hydrogen peroxide. Some sort of chemical reaction changed the hydrogen peroxide to water over the course of six hours. The nurse warned me that if I didn't wait six hours, my eyes would "burn like fire" if I tried to put the contacts in. I would have loved to see the scientists test the time limit on that little chemical reaction.
"All right Bill, hold still. This will be the four hour test."
"I don't wanna!! I can feel the blood pooling behind my eyelids from the last test."
"Don't be a puss, Bill! This is in the name of science!"
I know it didn't happen that way, but my version of scientific discovery makes for a far better made-for-TV movie than the real story. In any case, the doc's regimen didn't work, and my eyes were still inflamed. He charged me a 30 dollar co-pay to tell me that. I'm wearing my damn glasses again until Monday, when he's going to see me again and charge me another 30 dollars to tell me that I'm fine.
Fucking optometrists. They know they have you by the ocular balls because no one wants to self-diagnose their own eye problems. Everyone's afraid to end up blind. The optometrists even encourage this fear, because all of their offices are littered with those horrible posters of eye diseases and infections. I always wonder about the poor bastard who comes in with the bulging yellow eye that's leaking green mucus. At that stage, you just have to wake up and look in the mirror (if you can even see) and say, "I'm so totally fucked."
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3 out of 4 readers felt the uncontrollable urge to rub their eyes while reading this post. The last reader will be doing so right now.
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