too many words by laura lemay

I can see clearly now

Went in for my once-in-a-zillion-years eye exam this morning. Something had to be done; I was having trouble seeing the TiVo.

My eye doctor has a new cool machine. You press your eye up against a giant lens, there’s a big flash of green light, and then your retina shows up in bright reds and greens and yellows on a computer screen. It looks kind of like some kind of giant veiny blob from outer space. It looks like it should be breathing. My retinas are just fine, although I have a freckle on the right side. They took the picture a number of times to make sure it wasn’t just a shadow or dust on the lens or a cancerous tumor. Nope. Its a freckle. Freaky.

They tell me they’re going to email my retinas to me. I will be sure and put them on flickr when I get them because, you know, next to cat pictures there’s nothing cooler than veiny pictures of the inside of one’s body.

The other thing I discovered was that my right eye isn’t lined up. They had a test where you hold up a card with a hole in it at arms length and line up the hole with a dot on the wall. Then you close one eye at a time. The hole should still line up with the dot. It did with my left eye but my right eye shifted the hole way over to the right. I don’t know what that means, exactly. I suspect it means I won’t be an astronaut any time soon.

I didn’t get dilated this time around, which is good because I hate it, and I got a spiffy new pair of glasses ordered. Soon I will be able to read the television again and my life will be complete.

Speaking of totally not knowing what things mean, here are the mystery numbers that tell you everything you need to know about my terrible vision. Or it could be the combination to the safe. I don’t know, really.

R -1.75 -1.50 3
L -0.75 -0.75 162