Hand of the giants.

If you ever want to feel humongous, like André the Giant, try fixing your own glasses. 

I don't wear my glasses often, mostly for driving. Yet, despite the unfamiliarity with them, I gathered that something was wrong the other day in the car when I put them on my face and a lens fell out. Well, that's not supposed to happen.

Turned out I lost a little tiny screw that held the rim together. (Get your mind out of the gutter.) Fortunately my wife has multiple kinds of spectacles and we've acquired a few of those glasses-repair kits over the years, some of which have those completely useless plastic magnifying glasses. I'm glad that I'm nearsighted rather than farsighted, because if I were farsighted I would need my glasses to fix my glasses. 

Surely there is no common task more suited to making a man feel like a fumble-fingered fool than fixing eyeglasses. The screws are less than 2 mm long -- for reference, an inch is 25.4 mm. I don't care who you are, that's hard to handle with adult fingers. I don't have large hands -- size 10 wedding ring -- but I feel like I'm wearing baseball mitts on both while doing this job.

But with time and patience, neither of which are my friends, I was able to get the screw secured at last. The lens stayed in place all the next day while on a drive to Pennsylvania, accompanied by dog Izzy. 

It's satisfying to get a tricky repair completed. Although with my history of handiwork, it's always on the back of my mind that the repair will fail -- in this case, that the screw will shoot out and somehow get on my eyeball, that the lens will drop off my face and be consumed by the dog. Well, it might wind up giving him good hindsight.

Field test.

An old friend of mine told me she had to get a field vision test, and of course my imagination immediately ran away in mistaken directions. 

As if she and the doctor were field-testing munitions rather than vision. Better take this out to the testing ground where it's safe!

My next thought was that this was like a field sobriety test, only instead of reciting the alphabet backward starting with the letter M, she would have to read the Snellen chart upside down while standing on one leg. 

But no, the test is not about being in a field but rather testing the field of vision, and is more properly called the visual field test (or visual field acuity test). How much can you see in your field of vision that you should be able to see? It's an important test for glaucoma, Graves' disease, stroke, and so on, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology. (Note that the word ophthalmology is so frequently misspelled that it's almost an eye test on its own. I see what you did there, AAO -- I see very well.) 

There are actually several different types of field vision tests, depending on what the concern is and how much insurance you have. (Joke! I kid because I love.)

Fortunately none of these very serious conditions is a problem for my friend, but it's still a troublesome one: eyelid droop. In her case it's caused by dermatochalasis, or baggy skin in the upper eyelid. It cuts off a serious amount of upper-shelf vision. It's not a serious problem yet, as long as she's not about to be a victim of bird strike or UFO abduction, I guess. You wouldn't know it's so bad to look at her, but the result of the test showed an awful lot of things going on in the upper field that she didn't see at all. 

Supposedly it's fixed with a pretty simple operation (blepharoplasty) by the right doctor. I hope it all goes well. She's a good-looking lady and she needs to be good at looking too. And to not be abducted by aliens.

We apologize for another moment with Igor.

This has been another moment with Igor.
 

Blurry.

I had bad night of sleep, lots of work, and a long drive out and back, and I was ready for a nap. Once I knew the dogs would nap for a while too, I silenced my phone and crashed on the couch, face to the bolsters. I didn't move for almost two hours. 

When I got up, the vision in my right eye was blurry. Like, really blurry. Like, twelve martinis blurry. 

It wasn't hard to guess that I had smushed (to use a medical term) my eyeball by falling into a coma on it. I even had a red pillow mark like an angry villain scar running from my forehead diagonally over the eye. It persisted, however, making it difficult to do the editorial work that helps pay the bills. Could it be just smushing that caused this?

To the Internet! Which, of course, was a mistake.

In no time I found out that waking up with blurry vision in one eye meant that I had suffered:

👀 Glaucoma 

👀 Eye tumor

👀 Stroke

👀 Cataract

👀 Migraine

👀 Eye infection

👀 Tear-duct trauma

👀 Concussion

👀 Diabetes

👀 Macular degeneration (wet or dry)

But I didn't see anything about eyeball smushing. Of course, I didn't see anything clearly with my right eye at all. 

Well, it was a good excuse to knock off for the day, which I did. And I'm glad to report that this morning all is normal. I guess my eyeball reasserted its usual shape, or else I got over my glaucoma, tumor, stroke, etc. 

Remember the kid in Kindergarten Cop who immediately diagnosed Arnold with a brain tumor?

I'm convinced that kid grew up to create WebMD.  

The training is incredible.

 

"He's going into the back room and -- Oh, crap! Dude! Sheila's
in there and now she's got a gun on him! It's a double-cross!"

You look better without my glasses.

Unlike most people when they age, I have become progressively more nearsighted. I could see things close up just fine; but suddenly my astronaut-level eyesight is no longer what it was. Now people start looking blurry from a distance of about thirty feet. But you know what? I find you all look much better!

From a distance, wrinkles are wiped away, smiles are friendlier, and warts are practically invisible. Who needs beer goggles when all it takes is forgetting my glasses? Many an attractive woman has swum through my ken, only to ruin the whole thing by getting too close. Hey, lady, I liked you a lot more back there.

I'm sure she had a fantastic personality. Look at the lute! Musical!

Anyway, now I find my reading vision is starting to go, and eventually I guess you'll all be blurry from any distance if I forget my glasses. Which I probably will do more often. When I'm shaving I don't wear them, after all, and I'm sure it will do my self-esteem wonders when that visage is obscured.

Snellen, you magnificent B A S T...

Time to go to the eye doctor for a checkup!

I like my eye doctor, and my vision is healthy, and his office is pleasant, and I don't need new glasses so it's not very expensive, but I always go for an exam with a little trepidation. Could it be the terrifying brochures?

Could it be the horrifying Jack Kirbyesque exam equipment?

Or is it that puff of air for the glaucoma exam that you know is coming and you know is coming and this time you are NOT going to blink you're NOT you're AUGH I BLINKED

No, I think it's that I always feel like I'm failing when I get whipped by the Snellen Chart.

Herman Snellen of the Netherlands was not the first to come up with standardized charts to test visual acuity, but his (begun c. 1860) have been the most enduring. In America, we're used to seeing (or at least seeing part of!) this:

My doctor, like most these days, uses letters displayed on a screen at different sizes for the test, but it's still Snellen through and through.

This terror of mine goes back to my days as a student, when I was alternately smart and well-prepared or lazy and clueless---either way, I hated to fail a test.

At first the questions are easy: "E! F! P! Oh, this is a cinch! Gonna ace this one."

But then it gets tricky: "D... E... uh, F? P... O..."

And then you hit the rough sledding: "F... uh.... B? No, D! No, B! Wait--- DAMMIT! B! F, definitely F, unless it's P. (They wouldn't do an F again so quickly, would they?) L... T... um, O? C? O or C? Close enough? Are there any essay questions?"

Like a video game with ever-more-difficult boards, eventually you're going to fail. You just hope not to fail quickly. It's very discouraging, and leaves me feeling doomed.