doctor's orders.

Last week I made a last-minute quick trip to the eye doctor to update my prescription for contacts, while I am still under both of my parents' vision plans, and also since my contacts were almost gone, and I was on my last pair, which happened to be slightly irritating my eyes.  Everything seemed to be going smoothly, although I could tell I had quite a headache and a harder time concentrating on anything on the screens that the "assistant" was showing me. Those are some mighty fancy machines though, so I'm guessing they could read my eyeball pretty well, if not my mind as well.  Anyway, so I get to the part where I sit in the big fancy chair with the actual eye doctor, and as soon as he takes a look at my eyes, he bluntly states: "oh. your corneas are scratched. I can't do anything about that today. you'll have to come back in a week." What?!! 

First, let me rant briefly... if you are going to tell a patient something like that, please elaborate and don't act as though you have somewhere better to be! You may know what you mean to say, but I don't. You freaked me out.  

Anyway, the doctor kept his statements blunt and brief, and I just assumed it couldn't be that big of a deal, otherwise, he would have been explaining more, but I still didn't like the way I felt treated. (Mental note: consider explains things that others don't know... and maybe find a new doctor next round of eye check-ups.)

So... it's really not that big of a deal, apparently.  My eyes were scratched from old contacts. Apparently, this crazy plastic material that helps me see clearly can also damage my eyesight if I'm not careful.  Which makes sense as to why I've had a hard time concentrating this past week, and why things got blurry faster.  So for fear of damaging my eyes further, and because it's the doctor's orders, I am sporting my fabulous green spectacles this week.  This is not all that bad, except that I had the lady at Lenscrafters tighten the glasses, so now they seem to squeeze my head and leave me with a constant headache.  And... it's hard to feel comfortable with glasses on your head when you are working in a hot environment (the cafe) or moving lots of boxes (in my hot and humid second-story bedroom). Oh well.

Have you ever had an experience where it would have helped or you would have felt more comfortable if someone had explained things further, rather than leaving you with brief and blunt responses?  I keep thinking about how many times this seems to come up in life, and where I fall short in explaining things to people in order to make them feel at ease...