“You have a problem focusing,” the doctor informed me.
Well thank you Captain Obvious. Just call me Doug the Dog from “Up.” SQUIRREL!
I live with preschoolers – two of them. The cumulative attention span of our entire household equals that of a near-sighted goldfish.
Even when one of the muppets enters a hyper-focus phase, such as the desperate need to watch Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, their attention span drifts off in spurts. Destroy will remain glued to his show, but those delectable 24 minutes are spent seated, standing, sideways and summersaulting.
Search goes though phases perseverating on various vices – his beloved pink dollhouse, a fire truck, or the red Cars jammies. (I bought four pairs of those pjs to prevent unnecessary potty incident laundry room nightmares. Is that enabling?)
“You need reading glasses,” the ophthalmologist clarified.
Oh.
I’d gone in for my annual eye exam. The doc handed me his little black paddle and instructed me to cover my left eye before flipping open his lettered eye chart and instructing me to read – an activity I am usually quite good at.
I was relatively certain light and dark blurs were occurring on the opposite side of the exam room. The doc clicked his eye chart slide up to the next level font.
Nope.
Letters got larger once more. Umm…it could be an E? It may also be a plant. One of those.
Doc laughed and began fiddling with lens caps. He held up a glass monocle in front of my open eye, noting, “Ok, here’s where your prescription should be.”
Holy crap! I SEE LETTERS! (Totally better than dead people.)
The hilllllls are alive….with the sound of muuuusic. (Ok, no they’re not. They’re dead because we’re having a drought in California.) But trees! The hills aren’t an impressionist painting after all. (Which is good, I would have recommended the green paint instead of brown.)
See, my left eye still has perfect vision, which then tries to compensate for the desperate shortcomings of my right (a headache in so many more ways than one). So when I play their silly little games (like covering my left eye to read their monkey/plant/letter chart) things become quite hallucinogenic.
This was proven when I switched sides. With my left eye? Those tiny 2pt font letters waaaay over there on the very bottom of the previously blurry chart – PDCOSK, bitches!
I know I’m lucky to have made it this far. GrammaJ is pretty much blind as a bat without her coke bottles. Search and Destroy already beat the retinopathy of prematurity odds.
According to the doctor, it’s not tremendously uncommon for each eye to have a different prescription. Unusual for one of those to be 20/20, but not unheard of. Just more proof of my right-brained creativity. Or that my brain is melting from within. One of those.
Or maybe someone gave you a lobotomy while you slept (sorry I was watching Criminal Minds last night…..)
I lasted until I was 8 at which time my teacher sent a note home with me to my mum and I found myself having an eye test. She promised me 5p for every letter I read, she told me off when I was ‘messing about’ and saying I couldn’t read the first letter on the board. I came out with a coke bottle prescription and realised everything was much closer to me than they used to be.