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Friday,
January 6, 2006
And lo, I am asymmetrical!
Fate smiled upon me yesterday when I called the ophthalmologist -- they had a cancellation at 10:00 AM today, and did I want that?
I said yes please, so they penciled me in and I showed up today for my exam (my last one was in 2003, so I needed a new one before they could dispense a new set of glasses). As it turned out, it's probably good that I had the exam, because the practice has a new machine that can take a 200 degree picture of your retina -- it replaces the old dilation method, and gives a much clearer view of what's happening with the retina.
Turns out, what's happening with my left retina is that it doesn't match my right retina. The point where the optical nerve joins the retina is slightly larger than usual, indicating a "soft nerve" which can be more prone to problems like glaucoma. It's most likely I was born with this (I've always had some odd visual effects with my left eye), but the doc wants me to have some baseline tests run so that future docs have a better idea of what's going on twenty years down the line. Which makes sense to me -- better to know than not to know, so I need to see if my new medical insurance will cover the tests. If it doesn't, I'll pay for them myself (they're not too terribly expensive).
The rest of the exam went without a hitch -- my scrip hasn't changed, and apart from a touch of astigmatism in my left eye (dratted eye!) everything is good. I also got checked out for contacts, and he gave me a pair to wear for the week, which is interesting -- I don't think I've worn contacts for three years or so, and it takes my eyes a while to get used to them.
After all the medical stuff, I bopped out to the display room and picked out a new set of frames (the company that made my old ones went out of business, but I found a set much like them, AND with integral magnets for snap-on sunglasses -- score!). Best of all, the total costs for the inital exam, retinal pictures, contacts and new glasses came out to $509 -- since I was expecting to pay about $500 just for the glasses if I was lucky, I'm quite pleased (it helps that they were having a 20% off sale on their frames and lenses).
So for the rest of the week I'll be walking around in contacts, and this weekend I may go up to Stonebriar and try on some colored contacts -- according to the Acuvue website, pearl grey would be my classic color. We'll see.
ADDENDUM: Heh. I just looked up the definition of astigmatism, and it showed a picture of how the world might look to someone with astigmatism. There was a blurry angled streak across the picture -- just like the streak that has been in my glasses for the last two months thanks to my accident with the laptop. I think my eye was trying to compensate for the flaw in the lens -- cool!