I've been avoiding posting. Not because of anything in particular, but general anxiousness about my upcoming move.
Since my teaching contract expires on August 31, I am currently trying to squeeze my insurance for every last drop. This means that I'm going to a new eye doctor today and I'm going to see how many contacts I can get out of them. In another two weeks, I'll be going to the doctor's and seeing how long of a prescription I can milk out of them as well.
The eye doctor will be an experience. I haven't been to one in well over a year, mainly due to laziness, but also because I always have weird experiences with eye doctors. It goes a little like this.
When I was younger, I generally sat in the back of the class because of alphabetical order. In 7th grade, I noticed that I was having a hard time seeing, so my mom brought me to the doctor's to get my sight checked out. Turns out, I can't see far very well. So, I got glasses. The doctor was this old man who had some sort of problem with his legs because they kind of bent the wrong way. He smelled awful and had a terrible disposition. He got very angry at me because during the test, he gave me an index card to read to see how my vision was. The card had a very banal paragraph about a boy, his puppy, and a French baguette, and I thought it was such a random paragraph that I began to laugh. He was displeased in my reaction. He also got annoyed because when my face was in that giant contraption where they flip the different focal lenses, my eyelashes kept getting stuck, so I giggled then too. We were off to a bad start.
Later that year, I asked for contacts because it would be easier to play sports with. So, Mom hauled me back to the smelly doctor and we met about contacts. The doctor was examining my eyes and told me to look to the left, so I did. Next thing I knew, his short, stubby index finger was jabbing me in the eye with some foreign object! He stabbed a contact into my eye without ANY warning! Obviously, this did not fly with me. I winced and teared up, and he got angry that I was "making such a fuss."
Um....you just poked my eye without any fair warning, I think it's fair for a 13 year old to be displeased.
We later moved on to a different eye doctor. The doctor herself was nice; the rest of the staff was not nearly as pleasant. My doctor didn't mind that I giggled at a lot of things. She mentioned that she also does that. She didn't even lecture me when she learned that I wore my contacts for way beyond their welcome point.
However, the staff was rough. The woman who worked the main desk was in her mid-forties and from New Yawk. Every time I went in, she was wearing leopard print, and a lot of it. She had claws for nails, and a pinched face like Janice Dickinson. Yikes. The first time I went in, we were having trouble with my insurance cards. She yelled at me for not knowing more about my insurance (what 17 year old knows much about it?) and told me we would do the paperwork later. So I went in for my eye exam and all went well, but I had to get my pupils dilated. After that, my insurance problem was solved, and she told me I had to fill out all the paperwork. Here's the problem: I couldn't see a single thing, let alone read teenytiny print. I had to call my friend Theresa to come to the eye doctor to not only give me a ride home later, but to help me fill out the paperwork. Once Theresa came, I started dictating my information to her so it would get filled out. The front desk woman SCREECHED at me about how that was not allowed and how I had to fill out my paperwork. I reminded her that my pupils were dilated, and I therefore could not see anything, but she still yelled on. Eventually, my doctor came out, and I looked at her with my massive, sad pupils and said, "I can't read anything, this is one of my best friends, it's cool if she fills this out for me as long as it's correct, right?" Of course, my doctor agreed.
Not only did that lady work there, but there was another man there that made me feel terrible. Not in the same kind of terrible though. This man worked with the glasses. I got my face fitted for my glasses and all. When I got them, they were slightly crooked, so I asked him if he could level it out. At that point, I noticed it: he had a lazy eye. He gave me my glasses back and asked them how they were. They were still slightly crooked, no better or worse than before. I thought I'd ask one more time, blood rushing to my cheeks out of embarrassment, and he gave it another whirl. Still, my glasses were returned crooked. That's when I said they looked great and hightailed it out of there. On my visits back, I'd ask them to straighten them out, and every time, they were as crooked as before.
So, as you can see, I don't have much luck when it comes to eye doctors. I'm going to a new one today. The woman I was on the phone with was incredibly delightful, so we're off to a good start. I picked that office solely based on the fact that the doctor has the same last name as one of my favorite comedians, Rob Huebel. Hopefully, he's sympathetic to a recently riffed teacher whose insurance runs out soon and gives me an incredible prescription for contacts.
Wish me luck!
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