Contacts
(This update is for Kay.)
I finally broke down and went to get contact lenses.
I went to the same doctor who sold me my glasses almost three years ago. Back then, he was a nice guy with a slightly nerdy sense of humor. Now, he’s silent. Taciturn. Saturnine.
I’m one of those people who makes nervous, goofy jokes with doctors. I guess it’s because I’m paranoid about things going wrong around or inside of me, and I want the people messing with my physical being to see me as a likeable person and not just as a carcass or a pair of defective eyeballs.
The eye doctor, as I said, is very quiet now. I couldn’t tell if my jovial (and admittedly slightly fawning) manner was amusing him or annoying the living shit out of him. It was like I was a dog rolling on my back at his feet while he was a man reading something disturbing in the paper. But then, just when I’d start to want to run out the door crying, he’d smile wanly or crack a very, very dry almost-joke.
If you’ve never worn contacts before and you hate having stuff stuck in your eyes, then learning to wear contacts can require quite a bit of patience. I don’t think my doctor had patience to spare yesterday afternoon. But I was determined. I’m tired of wearing my black-framed glasses all the time. They don’t go with evening wear. I’m wearing evening wear tomorrow evening. I wanted to get my contacts yesterday so I could look nice.
They weren’t working too well. One eye worked fine and the other didn’t. The doctor, with a polite smile frozen on his face, made adjustments and made me read the chart. Then I complained, and he had to do it all again. And one more time again. At the end of it, I could still only read the little letters when I squinted hard. “Good enough,” he said. I told him it was still blurry, but he ushered me out and said to let him know how they felt after a week. We set a follow-up appointment and they let me drive away.
I left the office, picked up my kids, stopped for groceries and then went home and ripped the contacts out of my eyes, my head throbbing. It had been absolutely horrifying, driving with my vision all messed up. The contacts were just plain wrong.
I went to work with my glasses on this morning and called the optometry office. The doctor answered, but at first I didn’t know it was him. He said hello and I said, “Yeah, hi… I got some contacts yesterday, and I’m supposed to come in Wednesday, but the contacts didn’t work – they were all blurry. So should I just wait til Wednesday and tell the doctor I haven’t worn them all week, or should I set an earlier appointment, or what?”
“What do you want to do, Gwen?”
He said it in a scary dead-calm professional voice, like HAL in 2001, except that, in 2001, everyone calls HAL Hal. And he calls them by their first names, too. But no one has to call Hal “Dr. Stuettger” or whatever. So it was a little more unsettling to hear my doctor saying my name in psuedo concern than it would have been, say, to hear my name coming from the speaker on a computer that wanted to kill me, but with whom I was on a mutual first-name basis.
“Is this Dr. Stuettger?” I said.
There was a long pause – the same pause he makes after I say something like, “So what do you think, Dr. Stuettger? Do I have cataracts? Hee, hee. I see you’re totally ignoring my questions. I bet you’re sick of hearing my voice, huh? Are you? Uh… I still can’t see the letters on the chart, by the way.” Dead silence.
Then, finally, he said, “Yes. What do you want to do?”
I told him that I wanted to get contacts that worked. He said that I must have put them in wrong, because I’d had “20/20 vision” the day before. I told him I’d actually still been seeing blurry the day before. Couldn’t it be possible that he’d given me the wrong prescription lens? I asked. He said it was “roughly” the same prescription as my glasses. Was there another lens strength we might try? I asked. Because I felt that we were very close. He said something weird – that if I tried them on and “felt like we could work with it”, I should come in next week. If I felt like it “just didn’t work”, then I should trash the lenses and cancel my appointment.
“And that’s it?” I said.
Yes, that was it.
“You know… I’m not trying to be difficult,” I said. “I really want this to work.”
He just said the same stuff again about cancelling my appointment. I couldn’t tell what he meant. Maybe “If you can’t agree that those are the right lenses, I don’t want to hear it.”
Today after work I tried the contacts on again, very careful to make sure the little notches were at the 6 o’clock position on my eyeballs. (I have astigmatism. That’s how toric lenses are.) It was the same as it had been before – the left eye was fine, and the right was blurry. After I spent half an hour taking the goddamned right lens out of my eye, I had a brilliant idea. I would put the left lens into my right eye, and see if that worked better. See, they had given me the same prescription in both eyes, but with two different brands of lenses, making them slightly, slightly different. (I’d told them that the right-side one was much harder to take out. “No, it’s not,” Dr. Stuettger had chided. But he was wrong.)
I put the left lens in my right eye and again tested my vision using the Speed Racer poster on my living room wall. This time, I saw better. Not all the way better, but better than it had been. I formed my diagnosis. I need the left-lens brand for my right eye, but in a prescription strength just a tiny bit stronger than that of my left eye. That’s it. That’s all I need. Then I will see.
So… here’s my question. Should I go back to Dr. Stuettger and tell him this? Or should I not go to him anymore, because of my vague suspicion that he just plain doesn’t like me and is therefore unsympathetic to my vision issues?
P.S. Dr. Stuettger doesn’t wear contacts. He wears glasses.
I briefly considered stomping into his office tomorrow morning, ripping my eyeballs out of my head, bad contacts and all, shoving them into his eye sockets and then screaming, “What do you think, Doctor? CAN YOU FUCKING SEE NOW? It’s not good enough when they’re your freaking eyes, is it?!?”
But no. That wouldn’t be conducive to a good doctor-patient relationship, would it?
