One of the biggest mistakes made during eye exams
The one obstinate rule I have about eye dilations
I implemented a rule around the age of 16, one year after I started wearing contact lenses. I can’t quite comprehend why 2.5 decades later, I’m still bickering about this, but I’m not budging. Before I’ll let an eye doctor dilate my eyes, I must sign all paperwork, confirm all health care coverage and answer any questions that would require me to read anything.
Before I had a part-time job, my parents handled all of the paperwork for my medical visits. Once my name was required to pay for anything, then that meant I had to read it. If one of my parents was with me, then they could sign health care paperwork on my behalf. But at the age of 18, when I went off to an out-of-state college, my name meant I agreed to all terms. Although I didn’t have any interest at all in journalism, I still somehow lived by the B.B. King song “Nobody loves me but my mother,
And she could me jivin` too.” (I heard this while watching “The Cosby Show” as a kid, and I thought that line was hilarious. Apparently, I took it way too literally.)
So when paperwork was put in front of me, with how much my contact lenses would cost, what the prescription was (in my teen years, eye doctors used to be able to hide this so you could only buy refills from them), and what I had to pay out of pocket. My eye doctor at the time was nice enough. However, I always had a bone to pick with her constantly mispronouncing my name for many years, even though her receptionist nailed it the first time. And when I corrected her about the mispronunciation, she’d shrug and say I let her call me the wrong name too much and she “couldn’t say it the other way.” From that point forward, I kept thinking, “If she doesn’t even respect me enough to learn how to say my name, why should I respect her enough to assume her paperwork is honest?”
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With dilated eyes, why would you sign paperwork that you can’t read?
The first time I pushed back on signing paperwork, I asked to fill everything out before she dilated my eyes. My eye doctor complained that she wouldn’t be able to give me a prescription without dilating my eyes first. And I asked her to explain what a dilation had to do with my contact lens prescription. After some hemming and hawing, she admitted that my prescription would not change regardless of the results of my eyes being dilated — unless there was something so serious from that exam that I’d have to reevaluate contact lenses altogether.
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Getting your pupils dilated helps an eye doctor detect harmful eye conditions such as glaucoma or macular degeneration, in addition to retina detachments and tumors. Eye doctors may choose to do it every other year though, which backs up my theory that it does not change your prescription. If it did, you would be required to do it each time. While I had nothing against eye dilation procedures, my bone to pick was sitting in a chair for 10 minutes waiting for my vision to be so blurry that I couldn’t read any words and then shoving a pen and paper in front of me to sign off on hundreds of dollars for vision supplies.
In one survey, 55% of the people admitted they read their contracts to an extent but don’t always understand what they’re agreeing to. More than one in ten (13%) said they "hardly” or “never” read their contracts at all. - The University of Law
I told my eye doctor I was fine with the dilation and paying the price for (expensive) contact lenses, but one had to come before the other. When she initially refused, I told her I’d do neither and go elsewhere then. Just like that, the order of eye dilation changed — and I’ve stood by this decision ever since.