Games Doctors Play

Hello folks, let’s chat…~smile~ I went to see my eye doctor this morning. He’s a good fellow and we always spend a little time swapping stories during my exam. However, just between you and me, he has a strange sense of humor.

For instance, he loves to amuse himself at my expense with something I call the dreaded “Better or Worse” game. I get to look through his big old eye machine at a chart on the other side of the room and identify these itty-bitty little letters while he gets to turn a knob and present me with various lenses and one repetitive question, “Is this one better, or worse?”

Can I be honest? This causes me untold anxiety. They all look the same to me. I can’t ever tell which one is better and I feel like I’m flunking Algebra I all over again. I really just want to say they’re all good and be done with it but Doc is right there, coaxing me to answer, “How about this one? Is it worse, or is it better?”

I interrogated Doc about his little game this morning. He gave me a technical explanation of why it helped him evaluate my eyes, but I don’t know. He’s not the first eye doctor to pull this madness on me, which brings me to my theory. You knew I’d have one.

I think it’s their way of relieving stress. I’m convinced there isn’t a frog’s hair of difference between his little lenses. And you know what that means— they’re laughing at us, y’all. This is the early stages of my research. I don’t yet know how it got started. It could be an overworked ophthalmologist did it as a joke one day and it gave him the giggles. So, he shared it at an eye convention and voila— the whole shebang loved it.

I thought about calling the good doc’s hand this morning, but he was really getting into it, so I just played along. What do you think? Will that make things better, or worse?

Hugs, Shellie