draliman on life

On Saturday I finally went for my eye test. I’ve got the system worked out now.

They send a reminder at around two years. It’s important to ignore this one. After a couple more weeks they send another reminder with a voucher attached for a £5 eye test. Hooray! I save £17.50!

Well, technically I save my work £17.50 because they pay (I spend all day staring at a pair of computer monitors – yes, I get two monitors because I’m just that good :-)).

But I save money all the same – it’s the principal of the thing.

I got a bit of a shock. Not my prescription – my eyes have remained “stable”. Apparently very short-sighted people (i.e. me) are at increased risk of detached retinas.

What? What!

Why has nobody mentioned this before?

The optician took pictures of my eyes and looked at them using a microscope gizmo with a massively bright supernova-like light in it. When I could see again she told me that she could see stretch marks around the edges of my retinas.

Stretch marks! On my eyeballs! Whaaaat! If there’s one place there shouldn’t be stretch marks, it’s in my eyeballs.

This is apparently quite normal in very short-sighted people. I’m afraid to nod my head now in case my retinas suddenly fall off.

She advised me to avoid extreme sports. I asked her if I looked like the sort of person who did extreme sports? Or, indeed, any sports? Does covering a pizza with half a bottle of Tabasco sauce and then scoffing the whole thing down count as an extreme sport, I wonder? Could the heat from the Tabasco cause my retinas to fly out of my head?

I’ll have to remember to be careful of my eyes the next time I go base-jumping, parachuting or bungee jumping.