Dilated Eye Exam
Today, I had my annual dilated eye exam. I’ve been doing this for almost 20 years now so you might say I know the process. I will try to keep the description short.
First, the technician takes you into a room where you cover one eye and read from an eye chart making you read letters in a decreasing size process. Next, they add numbing drops in your eyes and check you for glaucoma. This test has changed over my 20 years of experience but I think they put an instrument on your eye ball to check the pressure. Then they put dilation drops in your eyes.
It takes time (I’d guess a half hour or so but I’ve never checked), for your pupils to dilate so you get sent to an internal waiting room with subdued light. Everyone else that is waiting there is there for the same reason so sometimes there is some small talk. Not this morning. What does always happen is that it gets progressively harder to read as your eyes become dilated.
Eventually you get called into an exam room where, if the staff is good and on schedule, you get seated right before the doctor walks in. I appreciate my doctor for his expertise and not for his sparkling personality. In fact, he is my second ophthalmologist as my first one retired right before I needed cataract surgery. Anyway, he asks you to look at his ears while he shines a light in your eye and uses a magnifying glass to look back there. He does this twice - once with a mechanical thing you put your face in and once where he manually holds the light and magnifying glass to your eye. He mumbled something technical to the nurse and thanked me for being boring (believe me that is what I wanted to hear).
The last part of the process is the scary part - I go home. I have been afraid to ask why they let someone with dilated eyes drive
themselves home (afraid they’d tell me I shouldn’t). It’s not that I drive in an unsafe manner, it’s more that it takes me microseconds longer to see things than if my eyes weren’t dilated. If it is cloudy, like this morning, it is easier. If it is sunny, I can’t get my sunglasses on fast enough. As soon as I get home, I find a quiet/darker place to wait for dilation to wear off (which I’m already at 2 hours home and I still have some dilation effects).
Seeing clearly is a blessing that I clearly acknowledge every time I go through this process. There are so many blessings that we never think about because they are there every day - seeing, hearing, breathing normal, mobility, etc. It is worth it to take some time, now and then, to think about them and praise God.
“The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.” - Numbers 6:24-26 ESV
“Then he hurried to take the bandage away from his eyes, and the king of Israel recognized him as one of the prophets.” - 1 Kings 20:41 ESV
“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” - Matthew 6:25-29 ESV
“You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.” - Matthew 7:5 ESV
