Eye Exam

What to Expect

Routine eye exams are an important part of maintaining your personal health and enjoying life at every age. Our eyes continue to change throughout our lives, but these changes can occur slowly. Sometimes even serious eye problems may not be noticed until they have an irreversible effect on the vision.

In order to prevent vision problems, you will need an eye exam from time to time even if your eyes seem healthy. If you wear glasses or contacts, you should have your eyes checked yearly. If you have certain medical conditions such as diabetes or a family history of eye disease you may need yearly or more frequent eye examinations.

The Eye Exam

Your eye examination will consist of a number of tests and an examination to evaluate your vision and check for eye diseases. The tests and examination may vary depending on the eye condition for which you are being evaluated. Each test is important as it allows your doctor to assess different aspects of your vision.

Our well trained ophthalmic technicians will accompany you into the eye suite and perform special ophthalmic testing to prepare you for your visit with the doctor. For new, six month, or yearly evaluations, you should expect the office visit to take one hour. In order to have an optimal view of the retina, we may use special eye drops to dilate your pupils. These drops may sting upon instillation, and you may notice that your vision is blurry, particularly for close up, for a few hours afterward. You may want to have someone drive you to the appointment if you do not feel comfortable driving afterward. And, depending on your job, you may not be able to return to work immediately after the visit. If you have complicated eye problems, your office visit will take longer, particularly if it is recommended that you have special testing. In this case, your visit may take approximately two hours.

If you have certain conditions such as glaucoma, cataracts, keratoconus, neuro-ophthalmic, or retinal disease, you may need to return for further testing.

Patients having a neuro-ophthalmology evaluation should expect to be in the office for an extended period of time. Because of the complicated nature of neuro-ophthalmic conditions and the testing required to evaluate those conditions, your visit is expected to be several hours. Please plan accordingly.

Contact Lens Wearers

Unless otherwise instructed, contact lens wearers should remove contact lenses the night before your visit, and wear your glasses to the examination. This is very important to ensure an accurate evaluation of your refractive error. Bring the package for the contact lenses and your solution to the office visit, or have the information available. A complete eye examination will be performed including assessment of prescription changes and evaluation for general eye problems and contact lens related eye disorders. We have excellent optical services available through Harvey & Lewis. Their shop is conveniently located on the first floor of the Outpatient Pavilion. They can check the fit of the contact lenses and make any changes needed to the contact lens parameters of prescription.