I went for an eye check-up today. The optician has been sending me reminders since July, and I thought it was probably time I did something about it. Plus I thought my vision wasn't as sharp as it had been. That's sharp while wearing glasses. Without glasses I couldn't be trusted to cross the road without being hit by a bus. Fortunately where we live there are no buses, but I still don't attempt to walk further than the loo at night without them. Certainly nothing tricky like going down stairs.
Eye testing has got more complicated since I got my first glasses, aged around twelve, unless it is just that as you get older they test you for more things. I have reached an age where I no longer feel entirely confident that any encounter with the medical profession won't end in my learning that I have something wrong with me, and on this basis I don't like being tested for glaucoma. I don't mind having air puffed in my eye, it is unfomfortable, but no more. I just don't want to find out that I've got glaucoma. Fortunately it seems I haven't, this time.
Given that eyesight is pretty crucial and I might as well know all while I was there, I agreed after the air puffs to pay the extra tenner to have the backs of my eyes photographed. The assistant optician who does the preliminary tests said that if I liked they could e-mail me the photographs so that I could look at them at home. I said that since I was rather squeamish I probably wouldn't do that, but the optician showed them to me anyway. It was a relief to hear that everything was in good order, blood vessels, optic nerve and retinal pigment. Apparently if you have hypertension it can show up in the blood vessels of your eyes. It's amazing what they can tell. Not only are eyes a window into the soul, but also into the circulatory system.
My prescription hadn't changed much, though my astigmatism had shifted around a bit. I have never quite worked out how often it does this, and whether new glasses are likely to be an improvement on the old for longer than a few weeks, or whether my eyeballs will by then have bulged out in some random new direction. The optician looked at the state of my existing glasses, and ventured the opinion that maybe I couldn't see through them so well as I used to not because the prescription was out of date, but because they were so scratched. I think he did have a point. He asked about my contact lens history, which is the same conversation that we had in July 2009, and made a faint attempt to sell me disposables for wearing to special occassions, but I said that honestly I was used to the glasses, and didn't think my friends and relations would suddenly like me any better because I appeared without them. (In fact, I don't suppose they would even notice. A few years ago I had a tooth veneered, that had died and gone a funny shade of grey, and whenever I mentioned this fact, if dental work came up in conversation, my friends and family said as one 'what blue tooth? I never noticed'.) I didn't say it to the optician, but I think it would be rather rash to wear an unfamiliar optical device to a party, like attempting to cook a new and tricky recipe for the first time when you have people coming round. At weddings and special occassions you want to be able to concentrate on the event and the other people, not the workings of your own eyes.
The optician made a modest attempt to talk up anti-glare coatings, but I've gone right off those. The last pair of glasses I bought with coated lenses seemed to attract every piece of grease and dirt around, and generally looked revoltingly smeared, to the point where someone teased me about them. I kept some lens cleaner on the kitchen window sill and wiped them frequently, but it was an uphill battle. He didn't mention varifocals at all, to my relief, since I don't want those either. The only way to find out if I got on with them would be to try, but on the basis that my glasses always slide down my nose, and that my brain likes to concentrate on one thing at a time, I don't think we'd be suited. Even the optician was struggling to keep the test glasses sitting in the right place for the duration of the eye test. Apparently I have a petite bridge.
After the optician's examination came the peripheral vision test, given by a different assistant. This requires the subject to track a red light with one eye, and push a button each time they see a green light. The machine makes strange little arcade noises, and at least at the beginning you don't know how hard you have to press the button. I think they should give you a few practice goes first. As someone with poor eye hand co-ordination even when I am not sitting with my face pressed into a plastic frame and a pirate's patch fixed over my spectacles, I found this difficult, and kept distracting myself with half-remembered protocols from tests that measured decision making in signal processing. I must have done OK, because after the assistant had shown the results to the optician I didn't have to do the test again. I told the Systems Administrator afterwards how difficult it had been who said 'Oh, so you never got above Level One, then'.
The really difficult part, much harder than doing the eye tests, was choosing the new glasses. This is always tricky, because without prescription lenses I can't see my face. Hairdressers occassionally ask me what I think, before they've finished, and I have to remind them that all I can see is a pinkish oval with two dark smudges and a dark fuzz at the top. I never, ever take a friend with me to choose glasses, or anything else. People who are not professional shoppers are mostly incapable of separating what they like, and would suit them, from what fits your style and would suit you. Good sales staff in opticians can be very helpful in this respect, and I trust their judgement much more, even though they are trying to sell me something.
The other baffling part of buying new glasses today was the prices. I'd got a voucher that gave me money off frames if I bought a second pair, which I'd thought would be useful as I could get new distance glasses that weren't scratched and some spare reading glasses. In the shop they had so many special offers that the staff didn't understand them. There were budget glasses for set prices all-in, ranging from £20 to £60 or so including lenses. There were buy one, get one free (or cheap) glasses in various price brackets, all including lenses, but I didn't see what happened if you wanted to combine frames from the £99 plus a free pair section with glasses from the £129 plus a second pair for thirty quid ones. The designer glasses were all priced by the frame only, lenses extra, and there wasn't a handy table of lens prices anywhere obvious, making it difficult to compare the in-store offers with the £80 off voucher. I began to feel bewildered and deeply discouraged, and a kindly young man took me through the whole thing again, though we never covered mixing and matching between offers. My choice in glasses is limited anyway to smallish ones with plastic rather than metal frames, and definitely not rimless, because I need such thick lenses. Add to that the fact that I dislike big designer logos, and refuse to wear anything with sparkly bits on, and the choice ought to be easy because there are only about three pairs left in the running. The sales girl I spoke to having made a choice advised against my chosen reading glasses, on the grounds that they didn't fit well across the nose, and rummaged around in a drawer until she found some plain, brownish, fairly lightweight ones that were mercifully free of rhinestones, glittery swirls, metallic stripes or other distractions. For my new seeing glasses, which I will try not to wear for gardening and keep scratch free for a while, I was vaguely daring and went for a red stripe along the side pieces.
That took £99 and two hours of my life to sort out two pairs of glasses. And now it is a case of deferred gratification, because the ready in one hour offer doesn't apply to heavily short sighted astigmatics who require lenses like modified milk bottle bottoms. Even without coatings the lenses come from a factory somewhere, and could take up to two weeks. Lucky I haven't broken my old ones.
While I was typing this the pictures of my retinas arrived from the optician. I could post them on Flickr, but I don't think I will. I don't suppose you want to look at them either.
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