The door clacked open as the lever slid off of my coat cuff. Half of the door handles in my optometry office were left a bit oversized by some construction oversight. My favorite new staffers always notice it their first or second day here–the sharpest doctors in the visual business need to have discerning eyes.
“Hey hey, I’m Dr. Kensington.” I shake the young man’s hand, babbling through pleasantries I’m sure he expects. The uncomfortable-looking ones are usually here for something other than a routine exam, and the kids that don’t make eye contact are usually fretting over how to explain their symptoms without sounding like a lunatic visionary. “So what’s been going on?”
“I think I’ve developed a blind spot.”
“That’s nothing to worry about. My Spot went blind and lived happily with me for five more years.”
He laughs politely.
“Can you tell me more about it? What feels most worrying to you?”
“I… well, doc, it’s weird. That poster there?” His finger points to the enormous iris of an exploded ocular diagram. “I can’t see that from here. It’s not a blank space or blackness or anything. My perception jumps around that spot. I know something is there because my depth perception around it is messed up, but when I look that way my eyes can’t see anything there unless I move my head around.”
My eyebrows are dumbstruck.
“And the place I can’t see changes every couple days. A few days ago when I made the appointment, it was straight ahead, a bit to the left, really big. I could only see through my peripheral vision.”
“When did this start? Is there any pattern to when it changes?”
He starts to stumble over his words. “Well, I’m not certain about this, but have you heard of a kind of website called, uh, eye bleach? It’s for when, um, someone tricks you into looking at a gross picture online, so you go there and look at pictures of kittens or pretty girls or something to try and get the aftershocks of the awful thing to go away. I remember going to one after seeing something, but I can’t remember what I saw or what I wanted to forget. This must sound weird, but if that’s what it was, I guess it did too good of a job?”
“Anything else?”
“Well, I also poured real bleach onto my eyes.” He grins at me warily.
I laugh politely.
“Just kidding. No, that’s all. What do I do?”