I was the third generation of my family to go to our eye doctor, Dr. Bradley. A Navy man! Old Commander Bradley! He’ll fix you right up.<\/p>\n
He worked on my grandparents, their kids, and then we hit my generation and his one time humble office had turned into a bustling, popular practice with four locations around the area. This eventually morphed into a sort of teaching practice, and he’d wander around with a gaggle of eye doctor students hanging on his every word whilst his optometrist peons slavishly worked away, seemingly too terrified of the great master to even speak to the patients.
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I’m a creature of habit. I kept going to Bradley thinking it was a sort of family tradition. Hell, even when he was off my health plan, I paid him out of pocket…because tradition, goddamnit, is tradition. So an ordinary eye checkup once a year would run me $200 instead of the $5 I would have paid at the hated Kaiser.<\/p>\n
As time went on, I’d see less and less of Bradley himself. A slave would scuttle in and do all the work then, after a long wait (on top of a whole series of long waits), Bradley would come in and pronounce me alive or dead without really looking at anything, shake my hand, and leave.<\/p>\n
Then he moved into a phase where he was always selling something. I’d have a (make up name here and it’s not on Google or anywhere else) disorder, so I should buy his personally patented eye drops. I am in the threat category for…something, so I should get these other personally patented eye drops. If I want my glasses to last, then I must pay $30 for the special glasses cleaning fluid… And on and on, Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir style.<\/p>\n
[youtube=http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ApLLTV04Gbc]<\/p>\n
In fact…that whole Pirelli sequence is uncannily exactly what it was like going to Bradley’s for an eye exam…<\/p>\n
The straw that broke my back was when I started having what I called “white-outs,” where my vision would go white and I’d be blind for a few seconds. I reported this and was given a battery of tests for two hours, after which Bradley came in — now with a troop of student eye doctors gathered around him — and told me that the tests were all clear, so…dunno what the white out shit is. Might be something more serious.<\/p>\n
So I ask, “More serious?! Like…what?”<\/p>\n
At this he turns to his students and, right there in front of me, says, “You have to be careful with them. They like to panic.” Then he walks out, leading them along to the next exam room. Not another word spoken to me. <\/p>\n
A few weeks later (the white-outs stopped on their own), I got a bill from Bradley’s office for $350 for all the tests. Something they didn’t tell me about at the time. I called and yelled at his cow-like receptionist, got nowhere, and they tracked me down with bills for three years afterwards… But that was my last visit to see the old Commander. The bill went unpaid and, as far as I know, Bradley is still practicing, and still cautioning his students to “be careful with them,” those horrible patients who must just ruin his day. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was the third generation of my family to go to our eye doctor, Dr. Bradley. A Navy man! Old Commander Bradley! He’ll fix you right up. He worked on my grandparents, their kids, and then we hit my generation …<\/p>\n