Why do they call us patients, anyway? I, for one, most certainly am not. Ask my partner. Ask my kids. Ask anyone who’s met me for more than 15 minutes. Not patient.

Case-in-point: my annual eye exam on Friday, which took about 1.5 hours — a full half-hour of which was spent trying to get me to keep still in the head-vice contraption long enough for that bright blue laser to get right in there under my eyelid to take a reading. Yuck. Not Patient!

“Let’s re-check both your contact lens and eyeglass prescriptions…” which meant a long time sitting behind the giant bug-eyed eyeglass-tester device, and then trying to keep focused on the doctor’s ears while she blinded me with that ultra-white miners’ light. Which means I could see the shadows of the veins in my own eyes for quite a while. Double-yuck. Not Patient!

“And since you’re diabetic, we’ll use two drops to get a really good view of the whole eye.” Great. Somehow managed to drive home with those ridiculous makeshift sunglasses, but couldn’t see well enough to cook dinner, dial the phone, or even check email (!) for four hours. Not Patient!

Now the annual eye exam is a MUST for us diabetics, of course. Happily, complications like the dreaded “cotton wool spot” can be treated or even reversed if caught early. Just ask Kerri over at SixUntilMe: she did a bang-up job of getting rid of hers.

But to me, this exam still counts among the many discomforts and indignities of being the so-called perennial “patient.” Not!

The happy ending is that I’m ordering a cool new pair of glasses. With purple-ish rims. The bad news is they’ll take several weeks to prepare. Guess I’ll have to be… oh, nevermind.

Monday, September 19th, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2)