Indignities My wife caught pneumonia. But we can't get her her chest x-ray without paying a $100 copay unless the x-ray is ordered by her internist rather than by her ear, nose, and throat person. But the internist has no clue exactly what x-rays the ear, nose, and throat person wants to see. So we have to carry the orders for the x-ray form the ear, nose, and throat person to the internist, so that the internist can copy them and submit them to the x-ray lab...

Among other indignities, I suffered a paper cut.

In addition, when I got into my car and put on my sunglasses, I burned my nose. The sunglasses had been lying in the sun, you see. And even though the air temperature was only in the low seventies, the metal part of the sunglasses's nosepiece and the air had not reached thermal equilibrium. Yet another lesson in how fierce the radiation environment of San Francisco is in the month of June. We're not *that* far north of the Tropic of Cancer, after all. We in San Francisco have this enormous heat source/sink called the Pacific Ocean kept at between 55 and 60 degrees all year round. It dominates our air and ground temperatures (and our water temperature!). But we still have the summer sunshine of Spain's Mediterranean Coast.

And there's more: I had an eye exam--my first full eye exam (other than looking at the chart with the little letters on it) of my life. They dilated my pupils, looked inside my eyes, investigated the tone of my lens-focusing muscles, et cetera. They said my vision is still 20-20--although it was clearly better in the past. They said that I have Incipient Presbyopia and that in a year I will need reading glasses (although they bet that I won't actually get reading glasses until four or five years from now).

The indignity was that when I left my pupils were so dilated that I couldn't read normal books. So much light was coming in such a wide opening that I couldn't focus. So I went to my computer, changed everything to 48 point, and surfed the web for three hours until my pupils approached normal.

Posted by DeLong at June 03, 2002 01:59 PM