It Isn't Belladonna

      Yesterday, I went back to the specialist eye doctor for the last scheduled follow-up to my posterior vitreous detachment.

      Unlike previous visits, the place was crowded, waiting room not full but there weren't any pairs of empty seats left after Tam (my driver for the day) and I sat down.  But the wait wasn't very long, and they took me back for a quick eye exam, numbing drops, eye pressure test (28 front and 30 back?  No, that's tires) and dilating drops. 

      Apparently, it's not atropine (from belladonna or nightshade), which would wear off even more slowly.  It's probably one of the commercial preparations of this stuff.  I am normally light-sensitive and the amount of medication they use for a really serious eye exam leaves me wearing sunglasses indoors (two pairs of them outdoors, plus a hat and even then, it's not good).  It also knocks me off-kilter for a day: colors are wrong and overly intense, sounds are too loud, events too hard to make sense of.

      The tech gave me the drops and sent me off to sit.  You need to wait for the medication to take effect.  A half-hour is ideal.  They've got secondary waiting areas tucked into a maze of exam rooms and they try to keep patients moving.  Most of us had to have our retinas photographed, so they haul you off for that after a quarter-hour and afterward put you in another waiting area, to be seen by the doctor.

      That's what they did with me: a set of eight-by-ten eyeball glossies* and into the next waiting room, this one absolutely full.  By then I needed sunglasses.  I put my Kindle into night mode (amber light and dimmed) to read and waited.  And waited.  People came and went around me.  After forty-five or fifty minutes, I texted Tam that I was starting to wonder if they had forgotten me.  We kidded back and forth, and she went to the front desk to ask.  No, they said, it's just a very busy day.

        We griped back and forth in text for a while, then I returned to my book.  Finally my name was called, by which time I was nearly panicking after over an hour packed into a waiting room jammed with blurry strangers.  The exam room was small, dark and mercifully empty of people.

      The doctor was prompt, brisk and professional.  The room is built with an enormous computer monitor on one wall, covered in retina images and the pertinent parts of the patient's file; the doctor gets up to speed, reading even as he says hello, and starts dictating into a speech-to-text gadget almost immediately while checking the pictures, then reclines the chair and starts looking in my eyes.

      "Bright light, open wide.  Look up and to your left...far left...down and to the left, a little more left, down, yes..."  All the way around on each eye, with occasional short breaks, "Blink, now...good."

      He doesn't waste time or motion.  He's friendly, confident and reassuring.  Whatever the reason for my long wait, it wasn't because the doctor was dawdling.

      The actual eye exam -- and a clean bill of health -- was the high point of my day.  I had trouble navigating my way to the front desk to check out (at least I was expecting it this time) and trouble getting to the car.  I just shut down for the ride home, not looking out the window and concentrating on getting though it.

      Got home, worked online, had a small snack and had to go lay down in my bedroom with all the lights off, TV muttering to itself.  Tam was out, writing; when she came home, trying to order dinner was a jumble of confusion and cross-purpose talk.  We finally found something we both liked and I'm pretty sure we looked at television over dinner, but the details are unclear.  I went to bed early and slept for nearly ten hours.

      And I'd like to avoid that particular type and strength of eye-dilation medicine for a good long while.
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* Where I noticed some clever helper had removed flat metal covers from a machine and propped them against a wall, trapping one under the edge of an oversized medical-type power plug to keep it from falling over -- on the "live" side, and almost touching the pin.  I pointed this out as a probable safety issue.  It'll be perfectly fine until it gets nudged that last eighth of an inch, and then they'll find out what else is on that circuit, probably to the accompaniment of a loud pop and perhaps a puff of smoke.