For Christmas this year I got…pinkeye! Hooray for me.
Before you proceed with reading this post, go ahead and take a little time to make your jokes about how I got pinkeye. Victim-blame away, seriously. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard them all by now. The jokes are all funny and I can appreciate that brand of humor. Don’t worry, I’ll wait. It’s okay. Really.
Coincidentally I had an appointment with my optometrist scheduled for 12/29 so I suppose things kind of worked out (insofar as having pinkeye can “work out”), but there were a couple of aspects of the whole experience that I thought might be interesting to talk about.
First off: Doc diagnosed the pinkeye as being viral. He also mentioned that if I’d gone to Urgent Care or a family doctor they probably would’ve mis- diagnosed it as bacterial and prescribed a (completely ineffective) antibiotic. Non-optometrists simply don’t have the equipment/expertise to tell the difference, and the majority of the time it’s bacterial…so that’s how they handle it.
Huh.
Okay. I guess I’m glad I didn’t waste my time (and co-pay) on that.
Also of interest: the instructions on the prescribed eye drops are “two drops, four times a day, for seven days”. Doc told me that wasn’t (quite) right. Here’s the skinny: you only actually need one drop. Anything more than that one drop ends up just running down your cheek.
…but also, that one drop has to actually make it into your eye…and a lot of folks aren’t all that good at getting eye drops into their actual-ass eyes. So the instructions have to account for the fact that the number of drops that leave the bottle doesn’t necessarily have a direct correlation with the number of drops that end up in eyeballs.
Before yesterday I’m not sure what concepts of Resilience I would’ve expected to be baked into the field of optometry…but now I know.
Anyhow, I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas.
Happy New Year! I’ll catch you on the flip-side.