Hello. I went to hospital today. Nothing to worry about, but I thought I'd talk about it a bit anyway.
I went to have my eyes tested a few weeks back. I could tell that my vision had changed a bit and my existing glasses weren't quite doing the job any more, so I did the usual thing and went along to SpecSavers. I paid the extra £10 for whatever the fancy-pants new test that I don't think existed last time I had my eyes tested was, and came away with a prescription for some new glasses. All good.
However, the optician who saw me told me that he would be referring me to the hospital because one of the pictures they took of my eye was "a little bit blurry" and it was apparently "standard procedure" to refer anyone in this situation. Fine, I thought, but then immediately began stressing out about the whole thing.
I don't like hospitals. I'm terrified of the prospect of having to go in for medical treatment. I have only ever managed to have blood extracted successfully once, and on the second occasion it took nearly an entire day of being poked and prodded like a pincushion before they finally gave up and decided they probably didn't need to do any blood work after all.
I don't like hospitals for two reasons. One, I have always associated them with The Place Where People Go When They're Going To Die, thanks to having a few scattered memories of my grandparents near their respective ends. Secondly, this magazine advert from an issue of the magazine Advanced Computer Entertainment, which I'm pretty sure is the entire reason I find even the prospect of having an operation to be utterly terrifying:
(Aside: oddly enough, I had absolutely no problem with the Trauma Center series, and indeed those are some of my favourite games of all time. Go figure.)
Anyway, combine my fear of hospitals with the fact I'm also squicked out about anything involving eyes, and you can hopefully see why I wasn't relishing the prospect of having to attend hospital for some non-specific "tests". To make matters worse, I was sent a link to a page of information, which included a video of "what to expect if you are going into hospital to get injections in your eyes", which I didn't even know was a thing that happened, and which I really wish I hadn't watched.
My wife has been into hospital for some eye tests in the past, and she said that in all likelihood what would happen was I'd have some eye drops put in to dilate my pupils, and they might inject a weird dye thing to help them see stuff, but the dye isn't injected directly into the eye, thankfully.
I steeled myself. I could probably deal with eye drops if the situation demanded it. So I gathered my resolve and went along to my appointment.
After the inevitable sitting around waiting, it began with a nurse doing a brief vision test of the sort you'd do at the opticians: look through a thing, read the letters on the chart. Simple enough. She then checked the pressure of my eyes with a thing that I was momentarily disturbed to hear described as "tapping", but which in practice I actually didn't feel at all. Then a bit more sitting and waiting.
Next up was some imaging. I wasn't too concerned about this, because the nurse hadn't felt the need to put eye drops in to dilate my pupils, and there was a nice display on the wall explaining how the hospital does over 11,000 eye imaging tests every month. I figured if that's the case, they're probably pretty good at it, and are also probably pretty well-equipped to deal with people who are squicked out about eyes.
The two imaging tests were nothing to worry about — pretty much the same sort of thing you'd have done in an opticians' eye test. Look into the thing, get blasted with a bright light, get scanned with frickin' laser beams, people. After that was more waiting to go and see the doctor.
The doctor was a kindly woman, probably a few years older than me, who set me immediately at ease by telling me that there was absolutely nothing to worry about. She explained that, right now, for some reason, opticians are being extremely cautious about anything that appears even slightly out of the ordinary when it comes to eyes, so she and her colleagues had been getting a lot of referrals for people who had absolutely nothing wrong, such as myself.
She then went on to point out that because of my particular vision condition, my optic nerve is slightly off-centre, which is what triggered this whole process in the first place. She emphasised that this is perfectly normal, especially for anyone with short-sightedness, and that there indeed appeared to be nothing wrong with my eyes. She then promised to send me a letter that I should take with me to the optician next time I get my eyes tested, presumably telling them politely to stop wasting the hospital's time, and that was that.
There was no eye-poking. There were no injections into my eyes. There weren't even any eye drops, nor were there those scary Clockwork Orange eye clamps. So the whole thing was a bit of a nothing altogether, really. Just goes to show that sometimes, you really can build things up in your mind to be way worse than they actually end up being. And opticians are overly paranoid, apparently.
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