THE FIFTH EYE TEST

I’m now familiar with the entire layout of the hospital eye clinic. I had a test in every room of it today.

“I’m just going to get a particular book I need,” said the nurse in the first. I was left with the illuminated board of ever decreasing letters and the loud ticking clock, again.

I sighed. I knew which book she’d be getting. It could only be one, a book I’ve been familiar with since I was five years old, a wordless novel of nightmares, a recurring reference of rounded ridicule. It was Ishihara’s Color Vision Book - the book of coloured circles they use for colourblindness tests. I got to page 6 this time before the numbers disappeared. The same old inadequacies didn’t blend out of sight with them.

After that I waited for a bit while my notes went for a wander. Then a lady shone lights in my eyes and made me look at a picture of a canary. She was looking for my eyes reacting differently as I trailed her flashlight around the room.

In the next room I used a wand to point to circles on a board like it was part of some weird quiz show.

And in the next round, the ‘quizmaster’ gave me a buzzer and told me to push it whenever I saw a flashing dot in my peripheral vision. 

I was quite tired after that so I waited out in the corridor for a while and listened to a family trying to download Fortnite on to a Samsung Galaxy. Then I got taken into another room by a nurse who gave me eye drops and poked my eyeball with a pressure pen.

The drops have massively dilated my pupils. They’re still like dinner plates, hours later. I look like I’ve been drawn in anime. After the stinging subsided I realised that I couldn’t focus on anything. Good job I wasn’t driving home - the world was a myopic fog.

“Focus on the green cross,” said a guy who purported to be a medical photographer. A green cross wobbled into view down the lens. The world flashed with lightning and I was blinded as though I’d been goggling at the sun.

Eventually, tired and partially-sighted, I stumbled into the doctor’s room and sat in the examination chair.

“The good news,” she said, “is that there’s no damage to the optic nerve, the muscles are all healthy and the retina is fine.”

... which points the finger once again, at stress-migraines (unless the MRI results say something else). I was weirdly relieved, though I do need to figure out how to de-stress, obviously. Meanwhile, the NHS have been brilliant to me over the last month. And I can absolutely live with failing the Ishihara Color Vision test. Again.