Here and There

Part 1

I went for an eye exam today, but not because my vision isn’t deteriorating. Not appreciably, anyway.

No, I’m heading to South America (Venezuela, specifically) next week, and needed to get prescription goggles for some much-anticipated snorkeling.

My last eye test, I found out, was sometime in 2002. And boy, what a four years it has been.

The first test they ran on me today involved my placing my chin on a plastic chin-shaped tray and looking forward, not blinking, at a digital, flower-shaped, blurry object in front of a yellow background. The object danced around a bit, went in and out of focus more and more erratically, then finally, slowly settled into plain view. At this point, the machine beeped a generic beep, and we switched eyes for the same exercise over there.

I had to ask, “Was that to measure my eyes?” Not my vision, mind you. My actual eye balls. The metrics of the width, height, curvature, and other terms I’m not familiar with. All done through some sort of invisible (okay, okay, pun intended) force or device. Lasers, maybe. I would’ve loved to have followed up with the machine’s manufacturer, had a representative been present. Instead, I was happy to just let my jaw hang out on the floor for a few minutes.

Part 2

Just this past January, I went to the dentist after not having been in almost three years. You may recall (assuming I have any long-term, devoted readers─HA!) that my former dentist was savagely killed last October. Well, Dr. Gong’s fill-in, a roommate of his at UCSF, Dr. Hee, introduced me to a whole new reason to actually enjoy going to see the dentist.

After the assistant was finished X-raying and cleaning my teeth, Dr. Hee came in, donned his white gloves, flipped on a 14-inch monitor, and held a small wand with a cable sticking out of it in his hand. “Okay, this is going to show you what your cavities look like.” Wha? No fucking way?! I get to see the inside of my mouth?

I didn’t have time to panic or opt-out, had I wanted to. Next thing I knew, the mouth-friendly camera pen was massaging my tongue out of the way, and I was instructed to view the monitor, on whose screen I saw, filling the entire plane, one of my molars. Cool. Cool beyond belief. Kick ass.

I guess the moral here (if there need be a moral) is: if you don’t make it around to visiting your doctors or dentists for a few years, and you’re anything close to the dork I pretend to be, rest assured you’re in for a technological surprise. Or, hey, maybe this is just a coincidence.

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