Driver's License

Last week I went to get my Iowa Driver's License. They were surprisingly effecient--much better than my experience in Florida where I waited for 2 hours and then the computers broke down literally as I was walking up for my turn at the counter. It took all of 15 minutes, which was nice since I had Alice with me and miracle of miracles, my picture actually looks good!

An interesting thing happened during the eye exam that I'm still trying to figure out. As most of you know, my retina detached a couple of years ago and I had to have surgery to reattach the retina. Because it's impossible to reattach it perfectly, my vision was permanently damaged. The surgery also caused cateracts to form. However, my good eye almost completely makes up for the poor vision in my bad eye and I see almost as well as before the detachment (when both eyes are open, of course). When I looked into the eye exam machine, the clerk asked me to read the top line of numbers. Below is what I saw. I was easily able to read the numbers off to him.

The clerk then asked me read the numbers on the lefthand side of the screen that I had skipped over. I had no idea what he was talking about--to me, there were no other numbers on that row. Below is what I should have seen, but didn't.

What I'm confused about is why I didn't see anything. If the machine does isolate my left eye, like I'm assuming it does, I should have seen very blurry numbers. At first, I was worried that my retina had detached again without my noticing it, but if that was the case, it would have been complete blackness--I wouldn't have seen the white background.

Because I wasn't able to read the numbers, he gave me the flashing light test, where lights flash on either side of my head while I'm looking into the machine and I have to see the lights in my peripheral vision and tell him when they flash. I passed that test so I was able to get a driver's license, I just have a special restriction that requires me to only drive in vehicles that have side view mirrors, which is virtually all vehicles. I was disappointed to find out that my dad took the side view mirrors off his hot rod because they were getting banged up, but being the nice dad that he is, he told me that he'd put them back on if I wanted to drive the car.