A visit to the eye doctor

Letter from the editor #1

I’m excited to launch a new category of posts here on my blog: Letters from the Editor.

These will be briefer, more personal posts that explore something on my mind. But don’t worry, we’ll always circle back to the bigger, broader world of the mind and the cultures our minds inhabit.

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I hadn’t been to the eye doctor for quite a while — so I dropped in for an appointment this past Thursday to see what I’d been missing. (Ha, a pun already.)

Close-up of eye during eye exam

After an elevator ride to the third floor, I was in a slightly crowded waiting room of folks with heads bent over phones, thumbing their way through their own sea of emails, posts, news.

With so few seats open, someone sat beside me and then promptly moved seats when another became available. Our personal space is so prized that the thought of being too near a stranger for too long is unnerving. Our little dance of social norms.

A couple walked in and sat on one of the couches near me. A doctor called them, wheeling out a little screen propped up on a wheeled stand — eerily reminiscent of the iTeacher on Ned’s Declassified who appears only as a head on a screen, wheeling her way around the school.

Hello, I’m your doctor today. And then the man on the screen translated it seamlessly into the couple’s native language. They nodded, smiled. Centuries of communication barriers eclipsed in a single interaction, a single screen with a smiling man on the other end.

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My doctors were two young women, also smiling. Doctors in training. They took me to my exam room and then had me go through the longest series of tests I’ve ever done. Small letters, bright lights, eye drops, stereograms, look up, look down, left, right. You make my job easy, I was told. You have nice big pupils. What a compliment! It’s a quiet, happy feeling when you’ve made someone’s life a little easier.

Where I see a gooey thing with flecks of green and brown and gold, they must see a universe. A world of blood vessels and cells and muscles that all work together to allow me to see the rest of the universe. I let them prod and shine away. Go ahead and look, tell me what you see.

I ask them why they run tests that make things look blurry (because it feels counterintuitive to uneducated me). They say it’s because they need to see how much “plus” I can tolerate — too much “minus,” although initially helpful, can cause harm over time. A poor paraphrase of the doctor in training’s words, but the sentiment stands: Too much of a good thing is, once again, bad.

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The attending doctor comes in to review the students’ work. Me, I’m their work. My measurements, my scores. As a patient, you’re a specimen. A problem to be solved. To these doctors, I am my eye. A universe within a universe within a universe.

Eye with rainbow passing over it

And what do these results tell you? The attending doctor is also a teacher, molding the future of eye care. Her question asks them to synthesize all my numbers on the screen into a single intelligible result. First a medical one, then a human one that they can share with me. What an art, though, the balance between the physician and the person. You’ll feel a little pressure. Sorry for the bright light. Let me know if it hurts.

When they answer, she narrows her eyes slightly. You might be forgetting something. They look more closely at the screen, an odd and accurate representation of me. Could a computer build a model of my eye from those numbers? Would it be me? Would it have seen everything I have?

Neither seems to have an answer for the attending doctor. A mystery. I think about how strange it is that I can’t will my eyes to behave differently, to produce different scores. I wonder if they’re really a part of me at all. I feel a bit betrayed.

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Some more puzzling over the screen and then the revelation: they were forgetting the ocular surface. Mystery solved — my eyes get a little dry.

My chart’s saved and filed away into its own digital universe. A piece of me saved in a time capsule. Here are some eye drops, see you in a year!