Wednesday, June 17, 2009

S'eye' of relief

Those few of you who follow my blog may recall back in March I rattled on about the poor eye test I had recieved care of Specsavers, and the fact that they were refering me to the GP. Well I never got to see my GP but was refered straight on to the hospital.

Today I went for that appointment. I spent an awful hour having various drops in and several people look into my eyes with a battery of instruments. At least the doc there had the decency to tell me why I was there. The pressure reading on my eyes was slightly above the top tolerance, and I had also failed the field of vision test. Turns out that yes the reading was above the tolerance levels ... but only because specsave had not allowed for the thickness of my cornea and when that adjustment was made, it put the reading to within safe limits. Three months of worrying and suffering poor vision for no reason.

There was nothing wrong with my field of vision either, I passed that with flying colours! Yeah, that was the one I did at specsavers after she had shone the light in my eyes for 10 mins.

Totally loosing all confidence in specsave I went to a 'proper' optician where he retested my eyes and told me that the specsave perscription was 'nearly' the same as his (which is a professional way of saying it was wrong). He explained that wih my pressure readings he would not have refered me but put me on a monitor with yearly instead of bi-yearly recalls. He also told me that all the specsave staff excepting maybe one on duty optician had only 3 day trained on how to use the equipment and were not opticians.

He did laugh like a drain when he questioned if I usually walked around with my nose in the air and I had to tell him it was simply because my glasses were bent and it was the only way to keep them on - again down to the lack of quality in my cheapo specsave glasses.

In the long run going to the cut price option has resulted in paying for two eye tests, 3 months of angst, an unneccesary hospital appointment and the frustration of having to wear the wrong perscription for weeks on end.

Guess who is NOT going to specsave again??

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