Four Eyes and Six Wheels

For several months now I have been noticing a change in my vision, so much so that I find myself suffering from eye fatigue. Yesterday I went for a vision exam and I was very surprised by the whole experience. You see, I’ve never worn eyeglasses, except for reading glasses purchased from the drugstore. It’s been about 12 years or more since my last vision exam.

After filling out paperwork which was very hard to read, I went into a small room and put my head up against three different machines. For the first one I looked through a small hole in which I saw a picture of a red house off in the distance. For each eye it got blurry and then clear several times. I didn’t have to do anything except look. For the second machine I looked through small holes as a puff of air was blown into each eye. This was obviously a glaucoma test. On the third machine each eye was covered as I looked through a small hole with the other eye. I had to press a clicker each time I saw a white dot flash on the screen while I stared at 4 small red dots in the center. This machine seem to be testing my field of vision.

I went into another room and the doctor came in to see me. He looked at the printout from the machines and told me that my eye pressure was normal. My right eye was farsighted with a slight astigmatism and my left eye was nearsighted. No wonder I have trouble seeing! Next, he asked me to read a chart across the room while covering each eye. It was very difficult to read more than one or two lines of the chart. I never had that problem in past eye exams. Then he made up a funny pair of eye glasses with multiple lenses and put them on my face as I read the chart across the room. Wow! What a difference! I could read every single line on the chart with both eyes. Just to be sure that the prescription determined by the machines was correct, he put additional lenses over the ones on the glasses, but they made my vision worse, so that proved the machine was quite accurate in its determination of prescriptions for each eye.

Then he put those stinging drops in my eyes and we talked about what kind of eyeglasses I should get. After about 15 minutes he looked into each of my dilated pupils and determined that my optic nerves and retinas were normal.

Since I work on the computer all day and I need both distance and reading prescriptions, we decided I should get two pair of eyeglasses. The first pair will be for computer work and will be a single prescription for medium and up close work, but with a larger area than I would get with a progressive lens. The second pair will be both distance and reading progressive lenses. These I’ll wear every day while doing tasks other than computing.

It’ll probably be a week before I get my eyeglasses so you’ll just have to wait until then to see photos of me with my new look. Now I’ll be the four eyed woman on six wheels! (My wheelchair has six wheels instead of the traditional four.)