It's funny how, as you get older, things that never caused problems, suddenly cause problems.
Like your eyes.
Most people who know me have never even seen me with glasses on. I've been lucky; I was only slightly near-sighted and only needed to wear glasses for viewing things at a distance. I don't drive, so that's one instance that I didn't need to wear them. Mostly just when I'm at the theater and want a clearer version of what's happening on stage. During my childhood I never had glasses at all, and it was only in my mid-20s when I was watching an opera telecast and had trouble reading the subtitles did I finally see an eye doctor. For a while I'd get a new pair every two years (it was covered by insurance at work) and once or twice had to have a slightly stronger prescription. After changing jobs and not having eyeglass coverage I went about ten years using the same glasses.
But now I have a nice civil service job with nice health benefits so I figured I'd treat myself to a comprehensive eye exam. I had been noticing a little trouble focusing on words close up and suspected I might be a candidate for reading glasses. I went to the SUNY College of Optometry in Manhattan and got a real thorough going-over. I was in that place for almost three hours. I was in the hands of a pleasant young woman who had a tag that said "Intern" and just before we went to the exam room a young man asked if he could shadow her. She asked if I was agreeable and I thought "the more, the merrier!". So I sat in the exam chair for the next hour as we alternated having her peer at my eyes through various devices and my looking at letters projected on the wall and trying to make them out as they changed sizes, shapes, and fuzziness. I've been having a bit of dental work lately (another benefit of the aging process) and this was definitely more fun and much less painful. Periodically, she would scoot out of the room to confer with her supervisor. At first I was slightly uneasy; did she see symptoms of something serious: signs of a brain tumor...incipient blindness... and want to find out how to break it to me? But after a while it seemed like it was just part of her training process and her repetitions of "very good...very good!" as I distinguished an "S" from a "5" were reassuring. The culmination of this phase was the administration of dilating eyedrops into my eyes and then being sent back to the waiting room to allow twenty-five minutes for the drops to do their job.
Forty-five minutes later, she returned to fetch me for the next phase. I was taken to a different room for more peering into my eyes. And then the supervisor himself appeared. A middle-aged man (probably younger than me, though!) he was a jolly sort who probably was a lot of fun as a teacher. They compared findings and he referred to class lectures to demonstrate points to her. I felt honored to be a part of the learning process. He seemed very impressed with my lenses, saying they were in very good condition, though pointing out his four-year-old son had better lenses. But mine were very good for my age. I wasn't sure how to take that part, but decided to accept it as a compliment (no point being competitive with a four-year-old I'd never even met). No signs of glaucoma; no beginnings of cataracts. He asked about my family history and I said my father had cataracts removed when he was around eighty. He seemed pleased with this and said I should live long enough to have cataracts. A strange blessing to bestow!
Then we came to my main problem: dry eye disease (yes; it's a disease!) and a plan of attack. He discussed the pros and cons of using antibiotic drops (they can run about $60 a bottle; that's a big con) but thought we'd try other types of drops first. Artificial tears and an oil-based emollient (Hail , Soothe XP...divine emollient! That's a reference to the chorus "Hail poetry from "Pirates of Penzance") during the day and Lacrilube, an ointment, at night. Not everybody likes putting that stuff in their eyes at bedtime, but if I'm game it should go a long way to making my eyeballs as dewy moist as any four-year old's.
So as we age, we don't just need to use lotion on our hands and moisturizer on our faces, but emollients in our eyes. At least, us women. Apparently it's a by-product of dropping estrogen levels as we enter the peri- and post-menopausal phases. The senior doctor said that men with dry eyes were like unicorns. He had never seen one.
