Friday, October 30, 2009

With swine flu once again popping back up in the national headlines, all things medical have taken a more serious tone. A worldwide pandemic scare will do that.

There is one respite among all of the doctors in the world. That respite can be found in the eye doctor's office.

During the course of a year, most people will see three doctors on a regular basis: your general practitioner, a dentist and an eye doctor. Of the three, only one doesn't drive me into a nervous breakdown leading up to the fateful visit.

That is because an eye doctor is the least judgemental of the three. A regular doctor will tell you to exercise more and eat better because you are out of shape. The dentist will tell you that you need to floss like you are some kind of dirty troll living under the bridge. But at the eye doctor; it's all cool.

Short of staring into the sun or committing some horrific act of trauma, your eyes pretty much just coast along on their own island. Sure, your eyes are still dependant on the overall health of the body, but in general terms you have little control.

If an eye doctor says you need glasses, he doesn't couch his suggestion by adding that if you didn't look at so many stupid things you wouldn't be here today. He just gives you the glasses and sends you along your way.

Furthermore, the eye doctor's examining room appears to be the only one that has followed along with the giant technological leaps we as a people have made in the last 100 years. There were so many machines needed to examine my eyes, my latest checkup took place in two different examination rooms. Yet we have yet to see one iota of progress in the stethoscope.

And before you start writing me letters, I know the regular doctor also checks out the eyes. Thanks for the cursory glance with the pen light, doc. When my eye doctor checks me out, he straps on what appears to be a coal miner's headlight rig, complete with yet another flashlight and some magnifying lenses. I feel like I am cleared to pilot the space shuttle after getting run through the battery of tests at the eye doctor's office. I don't get quite the same feeling after getting a wooden stick pressed on my tongue.

The downside is that although the eye doctor is probably learning a bunch of useful information about you through all these tests, only about one percent of it would make sense to the average person. Your general practitioner or dentist can give you a rudimentary idea of why you are an overweight mess or are losing teeth since we grew up learning the basics about our bodies because they are areas we have some sort of control over.

While in college -- having dreams about picking up a minor in psychology to go along with my major in communications -- I took a course entitled the psychology of perception. I thought it would be a really cool and interesting class until as I was walking into the first lesson, my friend Tom, who was actually majoring in psychology, asked me where the hell I was going.

"This is the hardest course in my major," he said.

"Damnit."

So for an entire semester, I juggled four classes that taught me how to do things like write an introductory paragraph in under 30 words and read words other people wrote off of a teleprompter while looking into a camera -- and one class that spent three hours at a clip discussing electronic impulses connecting the eyes to the brain.

Spoiler alert, I got a D.

Even with a barely passing amount of information about the eyes, I'm more than content to be ambivalent about what is going on up there. I wouldn't want to psych myself out before the dreaded, "which one is clearer, the first or the second," test.