In Delosa, Deseret, Estacado, and probably Cascadia and 46 other states there is a law that prevents you from re-filling a glasses or contact prescription if the prescription is more than a year old. This law has always annoyed the living crap out of me. I know when my eyesight is getting worse (I tell myself!). I shouldn’t have to do this! It’s the darn nanny-state putting its jackboots in my eyes! Vote Browne/Badnarik/Barr (or not)!

I talked to The Best Eye-Doctor Ever about this several years back. I call him Hu because I can’t remember his name, but he was of Asian extract I call him The Best Eye-Doctor Ever he was particularly special because he was one of the few doctors to actually convince me to do something that I didn’t want to do (in this case, take my contacts out ever). I told him that I would know when I needed to refill my prescription and that they shouldn’t make me do it.

He asked me how I knew to get my first pair of glasses. I skipped the whole story about how I attempted to con Mrs. Nelson) and flashed forward to my being unable to read the chalkboard from the back of the classroom. He asked if I’d noticed anything prior to that. I said that I hadn’t. He asked what the probability was that my eyesight went all bad all at once. I said that the probability was low. He asked me again how certain I was that I would recognize gradual deterioration of eyesight.

I told him that he had a point, but that a law stating that we had to get our eyes checked less frequently would take care of that. Kids do have their eyesights checked to some degree whenever they try to read from a chalkboard and adults when they drive. I didn’t mention the whole method by which I belatedly resigned myself to wearing glasses whenever I drove, which involved a bunch of near-accidents. I didn’t need to. Like the whole joke about prostitution, he said that agreed on the necessity of such a law, we were only negotiating time-frames.

Blah.

If it weren’t for the next thing he told me*, I would drive back to Colosse and tell that doctor that he was wrong, wrong, wrong. I have discovered how wrong he was in the last year. My glasses are inadequate for my left eye. I discovered this the same way that I figured that people would because I can’t read things at a distance as easily from my left eye as my right. Hu may respond that it only works if degradation occurs only in one eye and that if it had been the other I wouldn’t have notice a thing, to which I would have responded, “Stop being right, Doctor Hu!” But I don’t know his name, I’m not quite petty enough to drive back to Colosse, and I know that he would find a way to best me so I want to avoid that confrontation and will not be driving back to see him to tell him how wrong he is.

So where was I? Oh, yes. Regardless of what the everwise Doctor might tell me, the problem is not even one of eyesight degradation! I know this because I was stuck with a pair of old glasses from a prescription back and discovered, lo-and-behold, the left-eye problem did not exist! In other words, my eyesight got worse with the new prescription! Had his law not been in place, I would be wearing better glasses!

The same is true for contacts. I got a prescription for a new pair of contacts shortly before we left Estacado. I got the contacts up here. The vision in my right eye is awful. It’s better than if I weren’t wearing anything, but worse than my glasses and, get this, worse than what happens if I put my left contact in my right eye! Which is my solution to this whole mess. I know that Doc Hu would not approve, but tough luck.

So to sharpen the point I am trying to make here, I have to go back three prescriptions to get good eyesight. The previous prescription was only for contacts so it was unrelated to the eyesight problem. The prescription before that was for both, but I remember even the contacts being problematic on that prescription. I attributed that to having to deal with Toriqs, but if my astigmatism was so bad then you think I would… notice it… the same way that I noticed how much tougher my new contacts were than my old ones. And of course the glasses from that prescription have the bum left eye.

So then I have to go back to the one before that. That would be the prescription made by… Hu himself! So maybe I do need to take a trip back to Colosse after all… if I could only remember his name.