Humans, even those we call patients, all have a few things in common. Consider this: We all have looked up stupid stuff on our cell phones while at stoplights, which, for some reason, trigger our innate and sudden desire to know where Lebron James was born, for example. You heard me—this is ALL humans—at least in places where stoplights exist. 

We all want to be members of big box stores. Five gallons of dill pickles are essential for a household. We all want everyone else to brush their teeth. We all cannot survive without Starbucks. There are so many things we all have in common. 

Unfortunately (or fortunately), one of them is pain. Of course, most pain is just our expectation of pain. The question I have been asked the most since graduating from Pennsylvania College of Optometry is as follows: “You’re not going to puff me, are you?”

Is the NCT painful? If you think it is, it is. 

I have been told that I am also a human. Me, I like to alternate between bone-on-bone knee pain (which I blame on 10 years of long-distance jogging, which I was forced to give up to be a dad in ’82, because running a couple hours every evening while my wife tried to tame two wild creatures we jokingly labeled our “children” after her full day’s work was about to lead to “real” pain) and kidney stones, which gave me the chance to occasionally shriek like James Brown until the ER doc drugged me into submission. 

Patients sometimes present in what they perceive as pain: 

• “My glasses are killing my ears.”  

• “These new contact lenses hurt my eyes.”

• “You’re not going to puff me, are you?”

The vast majority of them have no clue what the word “pain” actually means. The dictionary definition is irrelevant unless you were born in the ’50s when you had to literally be able to spell. AI is working on everyone’s PhD so we can all be doctors, so why look stuff up in the first place? It’s too much of a pain, right?

Once in a while, in comes a corneal abrasion. These people are not very happy experiencing the real sensation of misery. They can barely utter the words, “You’re not going to puff me, are you?” That’s how you can tell they are really in pain and not just wussing out.  

Or, in comes the contact lens wearer who sleeps in his lenses for a couple months in a row but religiously removes them when they cause pain. Why does he do this? Because, he declares, “My glasses are killing my ears,” which is strange when you find out he doesn’t have glasses and he’s a -6.00D myope who is getting married tomorrow to the girl of his dreams who has always slept in her contact lenses and told him he should, too. She should know. She works at a shoe store. 

Hey, if it’s an ulcer, I do the right thing by prescribing the most expensive pain-relieving pharmaceuticals I can think of and give him 13 drops of atropine so he’ll enjoy his honeymoon on what he will later tell his children was the actual sun. 

Pain is mostly psychological. When you’re a kid, it’s painful when a bully pulls your shorts down in basketball practice. In college, it’s when a frat brother drives off with your blind date. In optometry school, it’s when one of the professors assures you that you will never graduate if he can help it. In the real world, it’s your knees and kidney stones. Well, so I am told… none of this rings a bell with me. 

But being human can be painful. Get over it. As much as it hurts you, go to the office and make somebody see better. Make somebody smile. Don’t ever get puffed.

Dr. Vickers received his optometry degree from the Pennsylvania College of Optometry in 1979 and was clinical director at Vision Associates in St. Albans, WV, for 36 years. He is now in private practice in Dallas, where he continues to practice full-scope optometry. He has no financial interests to disclose.