Days of Ophthalmology and Dentistry

That's not very poetic, but these cold January times are certainly not the days of wine and roses.  Of whine and diagnoses, perhaps. What follows happened one such day.

I took the stairway down to the second floor, sat down in the waiting room and picked up a copy of the New Yorker laying around to look at the cartoons.  "There is a blue dot  next to your name, they know you're ready, don't have to check in."  Sure enough, a nurse soon appeared rescuing me from futile efforts to read cartoon captions with my dilated eyes. She led me through several corridor turns to a small room, where without much ado and with few words she took two more photos of my eyes with a machine older looking than the one upstairs.  "You're all done, free to go."

That was the last one of my appointments that early morning at the clinic, two of them seventy minutes apart that I had known about,  and a third one in between them that I learned about while registering. All about my eyes, which are fine, thank you, just requiring a checkup every six months or so.  Coming out and rushing to the shuttle bus which rushed me to the train station to wait at the cold outdoor platform longer than for all those clinic appointments and due to an "unexpected delay", for which the loudspeakers didn't offer an explanation or apology, I was still glad I hadn't decided to drive, concerned not so much about the dilation of my eyes, which  I cluelessly had failed to anticipate, as about finding parking and then reaching my car back before the two hour street parking limit expired.

The second of those three appointments, and the reason I'm reporting this, was with a nurse who first measured pressure in both eyes, despite the interference from my eyelashes (!), and then squeezed drops in them, while I prayed that he didn't by mistake pick up a container of Crazy Glue, then had me wait 20 minutes even, and took two sets of stereoscopic photographs of each eye.

He then showed me the results on a large computer screen explaining what was what, optic nerve, blood vessels. "The doctor will look at these photos and send you an e-mail," he said. "Using old fashioned stereoscopic glasses". "Like they did 50 years ago,?" I interjected.  "Like it was done in the 1940s, 30s", he explained.  Oops, that's 80 years. "All this digital technology, " he continued, "and the method of viewing hasn't changed a bit." He pointed to the sturdy 3D glasses sitting by the machine.

It just happened that I was during this week  reading a mystery novel which takes place in Kansas and San Francisco of  the second half of the 19th century, with the main character a saloon keeper, and a photographer, who takes stereoscopic photographs as early as the 1870s.  How they were viewed is not described in the novel, and I'm not especially motivated now to research the matter.

Later on that day, (if you're still with me, remember,  there was that dentistry part), I stepped out of the house just before sunset to cover the car, when R. spotted me or I spotted him from 20 yards away, he was walking the neighbours' rather unfriendly German shepherd mix dog.  He approached and we began to chat.  The neighbours are on a ship cruise to warmer seas and he's housesitting for them.  Listening to the radio he learned that some woman had jumped from that ship committing suicide, and he was hoping it was not the neighbour.  It couldn't be, the victim was 54.  Why would anyone go on a cruise to commit  suicide,  we both wondered, when there are so many popular places around here to do it? "Maybe something happened on the ship," he speculated, "A breakup". "Or a toothache," I added, an angry Internet exchange fresh in my mind, where the angrier man ended up apologizing and blaming his bad temper on a toothache which no intake of aspirin could relieve. R.  then related his recent visit at a dentist's office, having a molar extracted, saying he's been on ibuprofen diet the past several days.   Which in turn reminded me of my own recent jaw pains when chewing a crunchy ciabatta with my left jaw.  Fortunately, I have a dentist appointment scheduled  in two weeks time. Do dentists handle jaw problems in addition to pulling teeth?


P.S. The two stories promised a couple of days ago are still brewing.