Patient Insists 'One or Two' Are Identical During Entire Refraction, Leaves With Wrong Prescription

A routine subjective refraction at VisionFirst Optometry devolved into what examining optometrist Dr. Helena Phoropter described as 'the longest forty minutes of my professional life' when patient Greg Munro responded 'they're the same' to every single lens comparison presented during the exam. 'I showed him forty-seven pairs,' Dr. Phoropter said, rubbing her temples. 'Plus-two versus plus-three. Cylinder axis ninety versus axis one-eighty. I even threw in a plano lens against his current prescription, which is off by a full diopter. Same. Same. Same. Every time.' Munro, 43, who scheduled the appointment after noticing he could no longer read highway signs 'or, like, anything beyond arm's length,' maintained throughout the exam that the visual differences between lens options were 'basically nothing.' 'She kept clicking that machine and asking one or two, one or two,' Munro told reporters. 'They all looked fine. A little blurry, sure. But equally blurry. I didn't want to pick the wrong one and hurt the other one's feelings.' Dr. Phoropter eventually defaulted to autorefractor readings, which revealed a significant myopic astigmatism that Munro's responses had completely obscured. 'His actual prescription is minus-three-fifty with minus-one-seventy-five cylinder at axis twelve,' she said. 'Based on his subjective responses, I would have prescribed him window glass. He literally could not distinguish between corrected and uncorrected vision during the refraction because he was, in his words, looking at the wall instead of the chart.' Munro has since received his correct prescription and reported that he 'had no idea trees had individual leaves.' He has scheduled a follow-up appointment, for which Dr. Phoropter has preemptively allocated a double time slot.