Anomaly

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I went for an eye test at the opticians. My mother booked it and a Christmas bottle of Penderyn was dependent on my compliance. So I went. Yes, bribes work.

My last visit was 2006 which is why my records are still paper ones and why I didn’t recognise any of the staff in there. It’s also why my current glasses show signs of deep corrosion. Nonetheless, I passed the eye test and am now legally licensed to look at things.

One eye has not changed at all and the other is a bit less short sighted than before. I have no sign of cataracts or glaucoma, in fact there is nothing wrong with my eyes at all. I think I actually scared the young technician on the peripheral vision test. Someone my age should not be getting that score.

Just like the rest of me. I take no medication and have no sign of any of the smoking, drinking or diet related illnesses even though I have steadfastly ignored all NHS advice for all of my life. Deep fried battered haggis dipped in curry sauce is a favourite of mine but it’s definitely not on the approved list.

So the question is, am I an anomaly or am I normal? I suspect I am normal but the NHS don’t want to admit it. I’m not profitable for the Pharmers.

I hope there are others out there driving the NHS mad. It’s a big job on my own.

If I have to though, I’ll do it anyway.

59 thoughts on “Anomaly”

  1. Did they do that test with the ***SUPER*** intense flaming bands of light that go from side to side while they peer in at your retinal cells? Sheeesh! I still don’t understand how that test isn’t actually harmful. It was like forcing yourself to stare into the sun!

    Heh, and then after it was all done I hopped outside to get my bicycle and practically fell on the floor as I stumbled back in through the doors. Heh, they’d forgotten to suggest that I pick up the freebie plastic dark black “sunglasses” before heading out into the bright real world with my eyes all dilated. LOL!

    Sorry to hear your eyes were OK though. I know you were hoping to get some relief from that monster hiding in your mirror every morning. I’ve got the same problem. Heh.. hey, that sounds like the basis for a Hillman story guy!

    :>
    Michael

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  2. I go for my new glasses today. Trouble is, my sugar is al over the place, and my eye sight has changed since the test.

    Did find something useful though, I bought a pair of reading glasses “off the shelf.”Useless for reading, but for painting 1:48th figures, they are GREAT!

    In fact even for 1:72nd they are not bad.

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  3. I’ve always been short-sighted, which is useful in my work, (electronics). I have glasses which make driving easier, and replace them when I break or lose them. These are about 20 years old.

    I now use pound-shop strong reading glasses for work, but I still don’t need them for reading yet.

    I’m 64 and seven eighths. I’ve always ignored all “health” advice. Last visit to the doctor was about five years ago when I tried to cut my fingers off with a bench circular saw.They didn’t know who I was, it had been so long. (The fingers survived, they all function but two have no feeling at the ends.)

    I eat what I want, including lots of sweets and chocolate and cake. I carry no noticeable fat.

    I ignore “use-by dates. I never avoid “germs”. I think this keeps my immune system healthy. Every winter I get a “cold”, which gives me a runny nose for a month.

    The only signs of age are my knees, which are starting to feel a bit fragile.

    It may all catch up with me tomorrow? I won’t complain.
    Mum and Dad smoked, and lived to 80. I expect to last as long. Fifteen years to go, (minimum). Bring it on!

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    • “I ignore “use-by dates.” Heh, I recently saw a Question on Quora: someone had an unopend 5 pound (weight) package of chocolates that had a “Best By Sept 2015” and wanted to know if it was still safe to eat them.

      I wrote back that they were extremely dangerous and needed to be disposed of properly and quickly in a safe manner.

      I recommended that she should mail them to me where I would see that they were rendered harmless by masticatory, digestigatory, and excratory processes.

      (I then went on to reassure her that I was kidding since Quora doesn’t like jokes and sarcasm — since there ARE idiots out there who’ll take anything they read on the Net as gospel.)

      ( I *LOVE* that little stick figure cartoon guy who can’t join his wife in the bedroom yet because he needs to keep pounding on the keys because “Someone is WRONG on the INTERNET!” )

      :>
      MJM

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  4. Ooo, I aced the peripheral vision test as well back in January. Spent far too much on new glasses, though – a few weeks in and it all started getting blurry again. I’ve been told, numerous times, that I’m gradually becoming less short-sighted, as I get older. But I really didn’t there’d be a massive correction so soon (but not soon enough apparently) after forking out £237.

    The Pond Shop sells glasses? I’ll have to investigate thanks. Thanks for the tip Under Underdogs ❤

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  5. My eyesight prescription has remained fairly static for years now. I’m short-sighted and fairly astigmatic, so no contact lenses for me at all, ever. I also don’t trust laser vision correction.

    I did have a scare a few years back; having bought the use of a machine which takes a good, hi-res photo of the back of one’s eyes the optician operating it felt that I really ought to be examined by a specialist. So, off to the local hospital and, after having had my blood pressure taken numerous times (I don’t think that they quite believed that such a large, mildly overweight chap as I could have such low blood pressure) and the pressure in my eyes tested several times also, a very nice chap had a look in my eyes and pronounced that there was nothing much to worry about.

    The local hospital give the impression of competent working medics who do the job and don’t trouble to go looking for trouble. I dare say it helps that not only don’t I smoke, but I once got a short contract on the basis of not doing so (testing for cotinine in saliva; completely useless putting a smoker on that job as the amount of cotinine on their breath queers the results bigtime).

    The big laugh these days is how population-level multi-variate statistics are refining the view of what is and is not healthy. Take for instance BMI and a person’s weight. The Politically Correct Orthodoxy holds that a healthy person looks a lot like a 1930s character from a Nazi propaganda film. The statistics demonstrate that peak longevity is seen in what medicine classes as mildly overweight people.

    Drinking is frowned upon, and the completely made-up alcohol unit limits are being revised downwards, mostly just because. It doesn’t matter much; they were made up crap right from the start so you cannot really make them more fictional than they already were. Statistical analysis as per usual tells a very different tale; peak longevity occurs in regular drinkers who don’t binge but who do consume a medicinal few drinks every day. This holds even when you throw out the teetotallers who were former alcoholics.

    The most fun can be had when confronting the politically correct with reality like this; the phrase “Are you arguing against reality? Let’s see how well that works out for you, then…” is a favourite.

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  6. I had one eye lasered a few years ago. Painless apart from the pressure being applied to my eyeball at one point. Has worked a treat. I had a small problem seeing computer screens at a reasonable distance but that’s sorted itself also. I think it was Zsa Zsa Gabor who did the lasering. Same accent etc. Perhaps not though.
    It’s my hearing which has become an issue. Nothing to do with playing in a rock band for years or listening to music through enormously loud and expensive stage monitor ear buds at every opportunity. Did someone say something there? If they did I didn’t hear it!!!

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    • My phone is nannying me. If it thinks I’m playing too loud music with headphones I get a pop up window telling me that I can harm my hearing by long exposure to loud music.

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    • Tedious and Cyn, but, don’t you know? It’s your SMOKING that ruins your hearing! Heh, here’s a snippet from TobakkoNacht (p. 248) on a study in that area:

      ==
      But one of the more unusual studies I’ve seen involved just secondhand smoke and a particularly large and juicy target audience within the teenage world – those who enjoy listening to music. In early 2011, Dr. Anil Lalwani published “Secondhand Smoke and Sensorineural Hearing Loss (SNHL) in Adolescents” and claimed that teens who spent time around smokers would no longer be able to appreciate all the wonderful tones of their favorite rock stars.

      Even a quick look at the study itself reveals a damning omission: there was no correction for social behavior differences among the smokers and nonsmokers studied. Obviously those teens who spent most of their weekends sitting at home, quietly poring over stodgy textbooks safely away from wisps of secondhand smoke, would have less hearing loss than their counterparts who head-banged away in smoky mosh pits in front of thousand-decibel speakers. Any rational researchers initially noting the small observed differences in hearing acuity would attribute them to the abuse of heavy metal on the eardrums, but that effect was already well known and unlikely to garner grant money.

      The researchers deserve some credit for not ignoring such a confounder completely, but their treatment of it, hidden right near the end – a trick we’ve seen before – while simply noting that “an indeterminate number of these individuals may have had CHL** instead of SNHL,“ was woefully inadequate. Note the phrase, “an indeterminate number,” which, translated, means that literally all of the observed loss could be purely from too many nights of partying.

      Such a reservation quickly disappeared as the authors basically brushed it off by noting that if there was a statistical association between smoke exposure and loud rock music, then it should be OK to largely ignore the music part and just look at the smoke – even if the physical exposure to the smoke had nothing to do with the loss! In the immediately following sentence they state, “This study demonstrates, to our knowledge for the first time, a relationship between tobacco smoke exposure and hearing loss among adolescents in the United States.” At the risk of being repetitious, remember that they had just, immediately before that statement, indicated that the relationship might have nothing at all to do with causality.

      It’s as though researchers carried out a study funded by PETA that determined that wearing leather jackets causes early deaths from fractured skulls – while quietly noting near the end that an “indeterminate number” of those deaths involved motorcycle accidents. Still, by attributing hearing differences to secondhand smoke exposure, the researchers were able to ensure good headlines and more research grants for future research silliness while also doing their bit to “Save The Children.”

      As to how the study was used in the media, my favorite related story featured the headlined complaint that “Newspapers Aren’t Warning Young People About Possibly Going Deaf From Smoking.”

      Why does such a headline not surprise me?

      Footnote:
      *CHL, Conductive Hearing Loss, is the sort of damage that would occur from loud repetitive noise. SNHL, SensoriNeural Hearing Loss, is what they had hypothesized would be ETS related.

      Refs:
      Lalwani A, Ying-Hua L, Weitzman M. “Secondhand Smoke and Sensorineural Hearing Loss in Adolescents” Archives of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery, July 2011, Volume 137, Issue 7, pp. 655-662. dx.doi.org/10.1001/archoto.2011.109.
      Hart A. “Newspapers aren’t warning young people about possibly going deaf from smoking,” Examiner.com, September 22, 2011. http://examiner.com/article/newspapers-aren-t-warning-young-people-about-possibly-going-deaf-from-smoking.
      ==

      Wild, eh?

      – MJM

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  7. I had a blood-pressure test at work. It was slightly high. The re-test, three months later, was normal. Nurse says “Have you changed your diet?”
    “No, I started drinking to dilute the blood vessels and began smoking again to reduce stress.”
    Nurse blinked rapidly and says “It doesn’t work like that!”
    To which I reply “But it has worked, hasn’t it?”
    Nurse is silent.

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    • Heehee… I’ve had fun like that too. One of my favorites is from about ten or fifteen years ago when I was being troubled by intermittent heartbeat irregularities. The docs couldn’t find anything, but in my travels around the net I happened to notice the importance of potassium in that area. I tried a few bananas, but REALLY don’t like more than about one a week (I think it takes five to ten pounds of them a week to give you a full dose!) Then I suddenly noticed that potato chips seemed to have even more than bananas, and I *like* potato chips!

      I started regularly buying two one-pound bags of chips each week at the supermarket. Lo ‘n behold the irregularities disappeared. And the extra sodium (which, proportionately, wasn’t as big a change as the potassium) had no blood pressure effect. To this day I kid around with the doc and nurses about my special “Heart Health Diet” and I haven’t had any irregularities in over a decade!

      :>
      MJM

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  10. Since my teenage years I have been ‘coke bottle NHS specs’ short sighted. And of course the vanity of teenagers demanded I never wore my glasses, which led to someone once wondering aloud why , after every ‘arrer’ thrown, I walked up to the dart board on the pub wall and peered at it (Underage drinking? Moi? Perish the thought …and mine’s a Snake Bite & Black, ta!). One of my Genossen explained “The Dwarf is as Blind as bat, that’s why he has to check the dartboard to see if he has even hit it.” To which the Enquirer replied, somewhat phased: “B-b-b-b-ut he’s winning!?!?!”.

    Working armed security meant being able to see-trust me, you don’t want anyone weaponized who doesn’t have 20/20…that way Electricians suddenly become terrorists. So I saved up my shekels and went and got contact lenses. Took me all afternoon to get the first one in and my eye looked like a tomato but when I looked at my kids after I suddenly realised i had never really seen their faces before. Driving to work that night was an epiphany, driving with 20/20 vision on a German autobahn at night is FUN!

    Been wearing monthly disposable contacts now for about 20 years. Last year I finally went for a check up with the optician (I buy my contacts online from the EU). I beat Leg, I last went to the optician in 2002. Apparently i give contacts wearers a bad name but my eyes are fine, except my arms are now not long enough to read the sms on my phone and I’m a bit night blind…so no more 250kmh ‘Nacht’ drives down the Autobahn for me.

    Off topic but I took the Bestes Frau In The World to our GP today, he likes to see her occasionally and review her psych-meds and ‘bloods’. Although it is writ LARGE in her records that she is a life long ANTI-smoker he still asked her if she was a smoker….so I replied “No she isn’t , I keep telling her she should start but she refuses”
    Took the GP a couple of seconds to work out I was making a funny…

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  11. I wear gas permeable contacts, and have for the last twenty odd years. Actually, almost thirty years now, I think. I don’t bother with all the saline/soaking/protein removal crap that they try and extort huge sums of monthly money for. I just clean them with a thin, old, no lint on it towel every couple of days. My optician, who is a lovely lass, keeps trying to, as she puts it, ”introduce chemicals to your life” and I keep politely declining. Last visit, I asked if my way of looking after my lenses was causing any damage to my eyes, and she had, in all honesty, cos she’s like that, to say no. So once more I politely declined the chemicals (the free bottle went into the bin unopened) and am still cleaning my lenses my way!

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    • I got mine just after starting secondary school ‘cos girls can be really cruel 😉

      Mum and dad took me to see an opticians in Battersea to get them – 1980, so they were still quite a new thing. The optician was a lovely man, about 107 years old, who pinched my arm when I couldn’t make out ‘O’ on the eye-chart. ‘Ow!’ apparently was acceptable 😉

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  12. I didn’t visit the doctor for over 20 years. When I finally did, for some minor irritation that failed to go away on its own, the bugger insisted on giving me a good looking over while I was there. He could find nothing wrong and my blood pressure was the same as it had been on my previous visit when I was still a teenager. The quack looked quite disappointed.

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