Is waterboarding at the Dentist's next?

I'm kind of weird about my eyes. I recognize this. I freely admit that a fear of ceiling fans (which could fall and slice your eyes apart while you sleep) and umbrellas (a dozen spikes hovering just above the level of your eyes??? Hello!!) is not normal. When the girls get pink eye the medication is administered by Chris, because I just can't bring myself to do it. If Chris is not available I drop the liquid near their eyes and then tilt their heads until it runs in more or less the right direction.

So. I'm kind of weird about my eyes. I've put off going to see the eye doctor because I know that they use eye drops to dilate your pupils, and I wasn't sure that I could handle it. My eyesight is not improving on its own, though, so it was time to suck it up and go in. On Wednesday I walked into an opthamologist's office for the first time in 10 years.

Initially, things went very well. I flinched and closed my eyes when the nurse put the drops in, but it only took four or five tries until it worked. (That may seem terrible, but I was just happy to have managed at all.) I asked the nurse how long it would take for my pupils to dilate, and she said, "Oh these drops aren't for dilation. It's to numb your pupils. Now hold still please and I'm going to push this little rod against your eye to see how firm it is."

Can this be possible? She was so very cavalier about the whole thing, as though shoving a glowing blue rod into your eye is no big deal, as easy and routine as reading those little letters on the wall. I literally jumped out of my chair and said, "Are you serious?" The nurse just looked at me as though I was being completely unreasonable. "Of course," she said, "How else can we check for glaucoma?"

I felt that it was unnecessary. I realize that I'm not all that knowledgeable about eye stuff but I didn't think it was a huge risk to assume that I don't have glaucoma, considering the fact that I am not going blind nor am I 80 years old. The nurse called the doctor in for reinforcement, and I suddenly found myself at the receiving end of the standard good-cop/bad-cop technique. The doctor, not to put too fine a point on it, was a jerk. I was stuck in that stupid plastic chair between the compassionate nurse and the evil doctor, as all the while a glowing blue rod was poised mere inches from my eye. I, as anyone who has ever watched Jack Bauer at work knows, had no chance.

Once I was done sobbing, they let me out into the waiting room while my pupils dilated. (Yes, I handled the dilation drops just fine, as they suddenly seemed very benign compared to the glowing blue rod of death.) There was another woman in the room who also looked like she had recently been crying. Once I sat down, I leaned over to her and said, "I didn't realize that a visit to the eye doctor came with a lesson in medieval torture." The woman laughed nervously, but just then the Evil Doctor walked past and shot me one of the most venomous looks I've ever encountered. I was completely cowered, and for the remainder of my wait the other prisoner.....um, I mean patient, and I sat in meek silence as we tried to make out the words in magazines through our distorted vision.

Moral of the story: there is no way in Hell I'll ever set foot in that office again. I have to wonder though: Is this really normal? Is it really a routine practice to take a glowing blue rod (the glowing and the blue is important) and shove it into the eye of every patient who walks in the door? Chris claims that his office checks for glaucoma using puffs of air, but I assure you that this was no puff of air. It was a glowing blue rod, and they put it directly INTO MY EYES. Please tell me that our society has not degenerated so much that everyone, everywhere should be expected to meekly line up and let some masochist in a white coat shove foreign objects directly into their eyes. Please give me some hope for the world.