The Eye Doctor Game Show

I’ve decided that I will never be able to be an ophthalmologist (one more profession I can now cross off the list). I came to this conclusion when I went to the eye doctor for my annual exam the other day, during regular business hours. Being unemployed, you find yourself in public places with people you never interacted with before when you had a job—old people, tons of them, I mean, entire buses full of old people, crazy stay-at-home moms with screaming children, adolescents with bad attitudes and other lowly, unemployed people like me—and this is especially true of any doctor’s office between the hours of 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. I have nothing against old people, seriously, I love the elderly—and I happen to know quite a bit about them as consumers, thanks to my previous job. But sitting in a waiting room full of old people at the eye doctor at 1:30 p.m. on a Tuesday is like riding home in a car full of tired, cranky children after they’ve spent the whole day at Worlds of Fun. Everyone has questions, which they ask the person they are with, then the people around them, and then, for good measure, they ask the receptionist. Everyone stares at you in a way that lets you know they are thinking about you. Everyone is complaining (“damn cataracts!”), and balling up tissues in their tight hands. A name was called and no one moved, it was called again, only louder.

“Eh? Did you say Harold?” said an extremely tiny old woman with hair so gray it looked purple.
“No, Howard—Howard?” said the clipboard-holding-name-calling-nurse lady.
“Oh, well when will you be calling Harold?”
“As soon as it is your turn. Howard?”

Then my name was called—“Carolyn…Carolyn?”—and of course I didn’t respond, partly because I was looking at frames and not paying attention, but mostly because Carolyn is my first name, which I’ve never gone by, and this always happens to me at the doctor’s office. Before giving up, the clipboard-holding-name-calling-nurse lady said, “Ms. Katherman?” “Oh! Here, here!” I yelled, and scrambled over to her, getting death stares from the impatient elderly folks still forced to wait their turn. After the nurse comes in and performs the routine eye exam, confirming my blindness and likely stigmatism, I am left to wait for the doctor. I waited about 15 minutes, and during this time, I overheard my doctor’s interaction with another patient, a man of about 80 with a Walter Matthau-like voice.

“Alright, read the smallest line you can,” said the doctor.
“Well, what line’s that? I mean, I’ll tell you right now I can only see one line and it’s the top line,” said the patient.
“Okay, how about now, does that help? Read the smallest line you can.”
“Er, uh…Z, B, well, I guess that could be a D, or maybe an O, um, let’s see, uhhh—”
“That’s okay. Here—let’s try this, is this one any better?” I can hear the doctor clicking through the vision slides.
“Yes, that’s a little better, but still awful blurry.”
“Okay, tell me which is better, one…or two…? Two…or one…one……or, two……?” The doctor makes exaggerated pauses between each slide.
“Um, well, it’s hard to say, they’re both bad.”
“How about…five…or six…? Five...? Or, six...?”
“Oh, hell, I can’t tell the difference between any of them.”
“Not to worry, we’ll get it right. How about four…or three…three……or, four……?”
“Uh, I guess three, but I still can’t see the small lines.”
“Alright, well—” The patient cuts the doctor off.
“Go back to one and two.” The doctor switches the slides.
“One…or two…two…or three…? Read the smallest line you can for me,” the doctor said.
“Y—or is it a V…? Um, V, O, L—no, that might be an I—V, O, I…that next one is an M, or N…ummm…I’ll go with M...” It was starting to sound like a game show—I’ll take ‘M’ for $400, please!
“Well, that’s almost right, we’re getting close,” says the doctor, recharging his patience.
“You see, I thought that L was an I, but then I was wondering—do you use lowercase letters? Probably not, so that’s why I guessed an I, but turns out it’s an L, huh? And M and N, that’s tough, but I was sure that was a M…”

This went on for quite some time. The doctor patiently listened to this man’s explanation for seeing the letters he saw every time he read a line. Meanwhile, I’m in the room next door pulling my hair out because I can’t stand listening to this man talk about why he can’t tell the difference between ‘Y’ and ‘V.’ Eventually, the doctor comes into my room and introduces himself. He is an older man, with kind, tired eyes and fashionable glasses that seem out of place given his calm, reserved exterior. He told me about my options concerning contacts and glasses, made me tell him about the time I scratched my cornea and had to wear an eye patch, and then he put those drops of fire in my eye—the ones that are sticky on your face and make you feel like your eyeballs are bleeding. He flicked on the machine and the lines with letters popped up.

“Okay, Carolyn, what’s the smallest line you can read here?” he said.
“Um, well, these eye drops are making it so that I can’t see anything,” I said.
“It’s not the eye drops—just tell me what line you can read,” he said, sounding punchier than he did with Walter Matthau next door.
“E,” I said. The big ‘E’ at the top was all I could make out.
“That’s it?” He is sitting right in front of me and I’m awkwardly trying to figure out what to do with my legs so that I don’t accidentally knee him in an inappropriate area.
“Yeah, but I mean, I can tell you what the smallest line is because I remember it from a few minutes ago when the nurse did this with me and I had my glasses on,” I said.
“Oh, well, I can fix that!”

He switched the screens entirely, and I suddenly had a flashback to when I was really young and memorized all the words to Goodnight, Moon. My parents thought I was some sort of prodigy child—while other kids my age were smearing poop on the walls, their child was reading! Then they gave me a different book, one I’d never seen before, and asked me to read it. Needless to say, they were pretty disappointed when they found out I couldn’t actually read—I’m sure I started smearing poop on the walls shortly thereafter.

“Alright, you shouldn’t feel those drops anymore now,” he said, and he was right, I couldn’t. “Go ahead and read the smallest line you can.”
“Uh, okay, well, uh, let’s see…T, S—no, wait, there’s numbers right? T, S, 8, W, Z, no…2?”
“How about now? Is this any better?”
“Yes.”
“Which one is better…one….or two? Two…or three…? Three…or one…?”
“Ah! I don’t know!” I felt like I was taking a test I didn’t study for.
“Okay, one more time, ready? One…or two…two…or one…?”
“Two?”
“Good! Okay, how about two…or three…?” At this point I’m dying inside because I’m sure the patient next door is pulling their hair out listening to me.
“Three? I guess, maybe?”
“About the same?” he asked.
“Yeah, well, no, not the same, but neither one of them are good,” I said, realizing who I sounded like.
“Okay, what do you see now?”
“Well, M, although I guess it could be N…V, but maybe it’s a Y…3, but it could be a B…uh…ummm….”
“Let’s try that again…” he said, which meant I didn’t get any right.
“Er, okay, well, P, N, H, 5…uh…F? This is a hard one. I want to say P because there hasn’t been a P yet, but now it looks like a R—R, N, oh, wait, is that a T? That H looks like a T to me…”

When the doctor was finished, many hours later, or so it seemed, I went out to the waiting room, hoping to put a face to my Walter Matthau so that I could stare at him apologetically, or open a door, or comment on the weather—something to make up for cursing him for being so annoying when I did the same exact thing (because karma’s a bitch and I’m just getting out of the doghouse as it is). But by now there were even more old people in the waiting room and it seemed unlikely that I would find my Walter. After I checked out, I went over to try on more frames—this being the main purpose of my trip to the eye doctor, because my glasses, according to the doctor, look like they’ve “been through a lot.” Next to the frames on display sat an old couple. The woman wore large, round glasses with a gold design lining the sides, her lips were pushed together and sticking out as if she was about to kiss a frog and she was holding tissues in each of her hands with her wrists crossed over her quilted pocketbook. The man was leaning over with his forearms resting on his thighs and he had a pair of glasses hanging from a chain around his neck, which swung like a pendulum within his hunched frame; I thought about how much smarter he would look if he perched the glasses on top of his bald head instead of wearing them like a necklace.

“Ugh, it’s always something with you, isn’t it?” said the woman.
“I suppose,” he said. I turned around and looked at the man—Walter Matthau?
“Well I’ll tell you what, this is the last time I’m going out of my way like this for you,” she said. I smiled at the man and he smiled back.
“That’s just fine by me.” Still, I wasn’t sure if it was him or someone who sounded like him.
“What did they even say while you were in there?” the woman asked.
“I don’t know, Norma. It was like last time, he showed me all them letters again, and I can’t ever tell the difference between one, and two and, whatever the hell else they ask, it all looks the same to me.”

Indeed, it was my Walter Matthau, and his wife was not happy about having to sit around and wait for him to get fitted for another pair of glasses. I turned again to look at the old man I had previously considered an annoyance as I was trying on a pair of purple Prada glasses, which I didn’t intend to buy, but they were purple, and Prada, so why not? The old man and I made eye contact, I smiled and he shook his head disapprovingly.

“Those don’t suit you, honey.” I starred at him, thinking about how ‘back in his day,’ people probably threw stones at girls who wore glasses while calling them four-eyes.
“Huh? Oh! Right, no, yeah, I know, but, thanks!” I said, laughing at how stupid I sounded, and probably looked. I put the glasses back on the shelf and walked out.

Driving home I thought about the eye doctor and the waiting room and my Walter Matthau and his wife, and then I started feeling weird about how oldness happens—how it just rolls in like a summer storm, hangs around long enough to fuck shit up, and then it moves on, leaving you blind, cranky, wrinkled and smelling like moth balls. Then I almost hit a mailbox because my pupils were still dilated from those damn eye drops and I was seeing threes of things.

I hate the eye doctor.