EYES continued from page 8
pressure cuff and the mid-body exploratory. Even specialists kibitz, though it’ll be about special stuff they specialize in. Not eye doctors. They’re all
business. No idle chit chat. When you sit in the eye doctor’s waiting area, you never overhear loud conversation, ripples of laughter or even a yelp of pain from other rooms. Everyone is, shhhh − shhhh − shhhh. They begin by listening to
your problem. This takes only a few seconds. In the medical world, the industry standard seems to be to have patient talk-time relative to the size of the body part. When my prostate cancer was discovered, the conversation was similarly short. After all, a prostate is only
slightly larger than an eyeball. But when I pulled a hamstring
running, well, the discussion rambled on ad nauseum about its effect on knees and lower back and hips and running style. As for the eye examination, it has
zero pizazz. They bolt your head to a vise and peer through your eyeballs for signs there may be more to you than meets the eye. You’re shown a photograph of your eye’s geography, which resembles Google Earth during an asteroid shower. They drop in goop that makes a sliver of light seem like a nuclear flash. You read paragraphs by long-
dead writers in decreasingly small print, just to prove the doctor took a couple of English courses to complement the medical degree. (Nothing from this magazine, by the way.)
During my examination, the
doctor showed me photos of a car on the horizon, in varying degrees of clarity. I was to pick the sharpest image. I quipped there were two
people in the car doing something naughty. From the other side of the machinery I heard a faint chuckle: as if to say, oh that Mr. Bercuson is a bit of a naughty card himself, isn’t he? With no muss or fuss, my
lightning problem has vanquished. Still, it’s disconcerting to leave any doctor’s office not in pain and with no punctures or bandages. Most importantly, my self- image is intact, such as it is.
Ottawa writer Richard Bercuson continues to view the world through rose-coloured glasses.
32 BOUNDER MAGAZINE
www.bounder.ca
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