About five years ago my family doctor referred me to an optometrist when I remarked that I felt there might be something wrong with my eyes because of having experienced odd symptoms like brief blinding light after having gotten up during the night. And a few recurring episodes of shooting stars. That optometrist had all her patients routinely fill out a questionnaire which appeared to me to be all about product advertising and consent, through providing your name, address, telephone number and email address to receiving public relations advertising from all manner of optometrist-allied manufacturers and suppliers of goods and services.

I was decidedly unimpressed and refused to complete the survey/questionnaire/authorization, which annoyed her office manager no end, who insisted that all patients are 'required' to comply. My equal insistence that this was unprofessional, intrusive and unethical brought the optometrist, a young woman, out from the back offices, demanding to know 'what was going on'. When informed by her irate office manager 'what was going on', the optometrist glared at me, turned to her employee and said the procedure could be suspended on this occasion.

I should have left that office either then, or when I understood what the double-faced data-collection sheet I was instructed to complete represented, but I did not. During the course of the examination, a stone-faced, civilly-unresponsive professional led me through the requisite series of tests, and eventually produced a prescription for lenses. I had particularly emphasized my concern that something 'organic' might have been going awry with my eyes, and she had said, firmly, that there was nothing wrong.

She was not present to fit me with the resulting eyeglasses, ordered from her stock of available frames. But the ill fit of the frames was only one thing; the more important one was that I found the prescription lenses far too strong, so I simply resorted to returning to the eyeglasses that I had formerly worn, non-prescription, over-the-counter glasses that seemed far more suited to my needs.

Five years later, after a surgical procedure to close a gap in the vitreous of my left eye, which had been the very eye that had presented with symptoms, I visited another optometrist, one who had recommended me to the city's top ophthalmologist who had performed the vitrectomy.

The resulting eyeglasses, with the new formula for 'progressive' lenses, which would aid both my short- and long-range vision, seem not quite what I had envisioned when I anticipated a great improvement in my vision, particularly my short-range vision. The prescription that resulted from this latest round of vision tests appears to be far less capable of magnifying sufficiently to reflect my new needs than the old ones I'd formerly felt to be too strong for my needs.

It seems I've progressively grown into the old prescription, while the new one now fails to meet my needs. Some story this is.