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His name Dr Lazarus, he is fascinated by eyes

14 March 2007, precisely 10.15am… Dr Lazarus walks quickly through the small late-‘80s furnished Collins Street waiting room, staring intently into the practice’s unused second office. He emerges just a few seconds later wheeling a high-backed red office chair through the waiting room and into the reception area.

“You might need to adjust the back and the arms,” he says to his slightly flustered new temp receptionist. The receptionist, dressed in sensible work-wear and a short-and-tidy hairstyle often seen on the heads of her 50-something peers, quickly settles into the chair.

“No, that is just perfect,” she says with obvious relief, keen to be less of a concern to hernew boss for this week. But Dr Lazarus does not mind at all. He wants to see her happy and settled before moving on with his day.

“Come in, come in,” Dr Lazarus warmly instructs his next patient. “Put your things there and then sit over there.”

The new patient places her bag on the old, vinyl chair by the door and walks two metres over to an enormous, cream chair more befitting a dental surgery than an eye specialist’s office. She does not come near to fitting into the chair.

“Well, what can I do for you?” the doctor asks with a quick enthusiastic clap of his hand. He listens intently to her short story of the blurred vision in her right eye since birth. He walks away from his long bench of special eye bits-and-pieces and over to the new patient.

“Do you wear glasses?” he asks while leaning over to peer into both of her eyes. The patient climbs down from the cream chair to collect the glasses from her bag, returns, then climbs back into the enormous chair. 

“So you wear these for driving and watching movies,” he asks while inspecting the glasses. “Yes,” she says with surprise. Most eye doctors instruct her to wear the nose-pinching glasses also for TV-watching and any other activity requiring looking off into the distance.

Dr Lazarus sits his smallish and agile frame in a chair in front of his new patient, and swings a large, silver contraption in front of her face, which is soon replaced by an even larger black contraption. “That looks like a telescope,” she says. He chuckles and tells his patient that he is lucky to have all of his gadgets.

“Put your chin here,” he instructs with swift enthusiasm. The new patient leans as forward as far as she can without falling off the chair, but still can not place her chin into the large, silver contraption’s chin holster. Dr Lazarus looks around his gadget to his new patient, and then shuffles his own chair forward to meet her halfway.

While waiting for the good doctor to adjus handles and twiddle knobs, the new patient’s eyes wander over the brown too-loose older-man trousers, sports blazer (she thinks) and white shirt. Her eyes settle on the dishevelled bowtie sitting colourfully at the collared nape of his thin neck.

“Oh yes, your good eye will tend to be the more defensive,” he says with clear fascination as the new patient flinches when a probe nearly touches the surface of her good eye. Dr Lazarus does not push the probing contraption on his flinching patient, and calmly replaces it with a less obtrusive and more familiar lens contraption.

“Is this better, or is this better?” he asks as he flips through the many lenses for both eyes. “What do you do for a living,” he asks with keen interest. He follows his patient’s reply with the declaration that “it is important to love your work”.

“I love my work,” he says as he pushes the familiar lens contraption back to its original position and walks back over to his long bench of special eye bits-and-pieces. “I’m going to try a hard lens in your right eye,” he explains. “It won’t hurt at all.”

Dr Lazarus quickly slips in the contact lens into the patient’s right eye. “Is that any better,” he asks with a slight edge of excited anticipation. The patient shakes her head “no”. The doctor looks disappointed only for a moment, then removes the hard lens with a little green stick.

Eye drops are sprinkled on the new patient’s eyelids - some of which make it into each eye. The patient is shown back to the waiting room and told that “we will be looking behind the eye” once the drops have taken full fuzzy-sight effect. Back in Dr Lazarus’s office 10 minutes later, the diagnosis is conclusive.

“You have Amblyopic,” he explains, smiling at his patient’s own unexpected smile. “Yes, it is a lovely word. But it also means ‘lazy eye’, and that is an unfortunate description. If it was discovered before you had turned three and a half it could have been corrected. But there is nothing that can be done now.”

Dr Lazarus does not pause long enough for his patient’s possible disappointment to kick in. “Now we should get you to wear a contact lens in that left eye,” he says with his warm enthusiasm. “It will greatly improve the quality of your life.”

The patient returns to her bag to collect one of her existing disposable contact lenses. “I don’t wear them much because they dry out my eyes,” she explains. “I can only wear them for a couple of hours at a time.”

First pausing for a few seconds to think, Dr Lazarus returns to his long counter to collect and give away a couple of small bottles of eye solution and a “wetter” disposable contact lens.

“Your eyes are really quite stable - you don’t really need to see me again for a year or two,” he says as he walks the patient to his office door. “Oh, and don’t forget to blink!”

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