Fuddland

I had my first eye test for over fifteen years yesterday, so I was relieved to be told that I haven’t needed glasses all this time — my vision is “better than 20/20” according to the optician, and my eyes are nice and healthy all round. Pretty surprising really, considering that I’m the only one in my entire family that doesn’t wear glasses, and I spend a very large portion of my waking hours in front of a computer screen — but then I am pretty careful about taking regular breaks.

It was a very comprehensive test — I was expecting to be just reading tiny letters on wall charts, which is about all I remember from when I used to go to the optician, but as well as that he also thoroughly checked out each eye for health- as well as vision-problems and put me through a peripheral-vision test [fix your head in one place, cover one eye, watch a red dot move around a screen and click a button when you see a number of green dots flash up elsewhere on the screen]. He also did the puff-of-air-into-each-eyeball-test for glaucoma; I’m not entirely sure how this aids detection, and a small part of me things it’s some kind of opticians’ running joke. But I let him have his fun anyway, and he gave me the all clear.

Apparently I do have the smallest of astigmatisms in my [of my?] left eye, and there was a tiny improvement in the clarity of vision in this eye when he used the weakest lens he had, but he said it wouldn’t be worth getting prescription lenses to correct such a small problem, and furthermore, wearing glasses wouldn’t make any difference as to whether my vision gets worse or stays the same over the coming years.

All this for absolutely no charge courtesy of Dolland and Aitchison.

#1

Lyle | 2005 / 03 / 23 – 16:05

The glaucoma test is (supposedly) to measure the bounce of the air puff off the eyeball. There’s an optimal response range, and because glaucoma affects the pressure of the aqueous humour inside the eyeball, if it’s outside that range, it’s likely that you’ve got the start of glaucoma.

Supposedly.

#2

bsag | 2005 / 03 / 25 – 12:37

Gah! Lyle got there first. I was hoping to sound all knowledgeable and intelligent… The problem with that test is that we all have a blink reflex if air is puffed into our eyes. Whenever I have the test they have to repeat it until I habituate to the air puff and stop blinking or jerking my head back (which somewhat messes up the results as you might imagine).

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