2007-03-30 - 8:44 p.m.
I tell you, I am LIKING this getting things done! Today I learned that there is indeed hope for my eyes. Seeing this new Optometrist, a tough Greek man named Dr. Spiro Constance, was a good and fortunate idea, and an entirely different story from my experience several years ago with that Opthalmologist who, in retrospect, seemed to border on incompetent. He was the one who said, "I could improve your prescription a little, but your glasses are very expensive and you'd be better off just staying with them." The truth is that although that sounds good, I suppose, there really is no rational way to understand or explain a statement like that. Basically, how I interpreted what he said was that my eyes had gotten to the point where they simply COULDN'T be corrected much better, that I would have to live with them the way they were. And horrible is the way they were, which is why I had gone to the Ophthalmologist in the first place, and from there, they just kept on getting even worse. So bad, that today with my new doctor, I could not even correctly read the very top line of the eye chart (with my bare eyes).
The thing is that I always thought my real problem was close-up viewing (which comes from age) and that the major reason for my glasses was for the reading part, and the long-distance correction part (a relatively new problem) was just "gravy" to perfect what I thought needed only minor correction. However, according to Dr. Constance, my current glasses had hardly any close up reading correction at all, not anywhere near strong enough for somebody my age, whereas the distant correction was huge and NOW the correction that I needed was DOUBLE what it was before. Also, I had had an astigmatism in my left eye but not my right, but now my left eye astigmatism is twice as bad, and I have an astigmatism in my right eye as well. I didn't want to push for an explanation as to why my eyes would worsen so much--what's done is done and the main thing is that Dr. Constance can make my vision 20/15, BEAUTIFUL, very good vision. None of this having to squint even with three levels of correction in front of my eyes. But I gather from Dr. Constance's various comments that the discount place I went to eight years ago for my current glasses did a bad job of prescribing and also used cheap quality lenses that have an unacceptable level of distortion--that place is now out of business, which might be a blessing. And THEN I went to that Ophthalmologist (thinking that the heavy duty guy with the MD degree would give me the best care), but my Optometrist today said that whereas Ophthalmologists are great for diseases of the eye, surgery, and so on, they are not so great for prescribing and dispensing glasses, which is what Optometrists specialize in. That does make sense, because really, that Ophthalmologist had completely WASTED my time and worsened my eyes considerably by his bad advice, whereas Dr. Constance even did several tests I had never had before in my life. I pointed those out him as they came up, and he said, "Whoever left these out failed to do a COMPLETE eye examination." Well, I can vouch for that!
I really liked Dr. Constance a lot, and I especially liked the idea of actually getting my eyes back to seeing 20/15 which is what they always were before I turned 40--although he said I would hate the new glasses at first, because with their progression from increased close-focal all the way up to double the distant correction and the multiplied astigmatism correction, they will take me about two weeks to get used to. Okay, I'll just have to get used to them, but I think that will be a pleasure!
Another thing I liked was how Dr. Constance handled the "choosing the frames" part. With the five other pairs of glasses I have had in my life, I was pretty much left to my own devices when it came to choosing frames, which I really had no clue how to do (I don't think I did a bad job, but I was stressed and anguished and never sure that I did what I was supposed to do). And even now that I have read several advisory articles on the subject on the Internet, I still feel pretty clueless. What IS the shape of my face, anyway? Square? Oval? Hell if I know--it's just a face, with no obvious shape-characteristics that I can see. And that's only the first step. Then there's the "are you a 'warm' or a 'cool'?" Huh? Some skin tones are warm, some are cool (well, I am a pale white person who sometimes gets some redness on the cheeks and then when it is summer, I attempt to get a tan but usually end up with a horrible sunburn), but then, some eye colors are warm and some are cool (I have three different colors in my eyes, green, grey, and hazel, in concentric rings around the pupil, and so my eye color changes depending up on the quantity and quality of the light), and then some hair colors are warm and some are cool (my natural hair color is dark brown, but I am graying to the extent that some of my hair is pure silver), so you have to figure out what all these subtile color qualities average out to. Pardon my French, but WHAT THE FUCK?
Well, with Dr. Constance, I didn't have to do my own eye exam, so I didn't have to do my own glasses selection, either. He took care of it. He took me into his glasses-selection salon filled with an immense array of glasses frames, sat me down in the men's section, and pulled a pair of frames off the wall and put them on my face. "Here, look in the mirror," he said (easy to do, as the whole room was mirrored). Hey, they looked great! I mean, I didn't see Ryan Phillippe or a Calvin Klein eyeglasses model staring back at me (my fantasy), but what I saw looked pretty good. Just a nice man with glasses, and the glasses were practically "invisible", meaning that they just fit inobtrusively without making any fuss or pointing any signposts at themselves. "Hey, look at me, I am a high-freak eyeglasses fashionista!" No, none of that.
Dr. Constance then pulled down a few other pairs for me to try, they all looked good, but I thought I liked the first pair the best. "Happens every time," he said, when I told him I thought his first choice was the best. I grinned and said, "How long have you been doing this?" "Since 1961," he said. So yeah, he knows what he is doing. If he cared about face shape or color temperature quality or even knew what any of them were, he didn't say a word about it. He just picked off the wall the ideal pair and we were done with it. (They're a modified sort of curvy squarish shape made of thin coppery/gold wire. No fancy designer name that I recognized. That was good, because when I put my old glasses back on, THEN I could see the prices of the various frames that he had had me try and the one I chose was a good $75 to $100 cheaper than any of the others!).
They will be ready next week, just in time for going back to work at the school. By the way, on that subject, Dr. Constance told me that his SON had gone to our school. That was quite a while back, two headmaster's ago. What Dr. Constance liked about that headmaster was that he was really tough, students learned really quickly to not mess with him. The headmaster was a legendary "paddler", a discipline method I could surmise Dr. Constance thought ought to still be in vogue. His kid had already been kicked out of one private school, but he came to respect this one. "I don't see how you can teach a kid if you can't discipline him," Dr. Constance said, "and I don't see how you can discipline them if they are in equal power with the teacher." Well, the power ratio is even more distorted in an exclusive private school, especially with the older kids, to the extent that the kids understand that they have MORE power than the teacher. If the kid has several hundred million dollars of his own, as several of them do, or his parents' names are on the building, or when they learn that not everyone lives on a $50,000,000 estate in Bel Air AND have a beach house in Montecito or on Diamond Head, AND have a ski lodge in Aspen or Jackson Hole AND have their own private jet, you can see why all of a sudden there may be trouble in River City. So Dr. Constance thinks they are going to have go back to paddling. As for me, I really haven't seen much at OUR school that I would think would warrant that. Our kids are under another, different kind of "disciplinary pressure", put on by their parents or the society or whatever other forces there are that work on the heart of a kid--they HAVE to succeed and succeed big, and part of that formula that OUR parents buy is "best private elementary school gets you into the best prep school that gets you into Harvard." When "secondary school placement" time comes and some of these kids don't get into whatever school is acceptable, their tears and their feeing of social anguish is much worse than anything a paddle can induce. And that was the other thing that Dr. Constance thought about private school kids today--they have to work too hard and they don't get to play. "Play," he said, "is the most important thing of all. If they have time to play and run around and be crazy, then they can stick their nose to the grindstone and work their way all the way to astounding success. But without that, they get burned out and that just might be the end of it for them."
Burned out kids? Now that IS a tragedy. Unfortunately, this city is full of them. But I think our school is much better at the "play" aspect than most schools. Which may be another reason why we seem to have few seriously trouble-making kids. So maybe that paddle can stay in the closet after all.
Meanwhile, next week, I'll be able to SEE again!
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