2-Aug-1995
"So is this going to hurt?" Harry asked the kind woman behind the counter.
"Not a bit," she promised with a smile. "We do this all the time, Mr Potter, and there's no pain at all. It will feel a bit weird, but that's all."
"Great!" Harry said. "Let's do this." With a quick and decisive gesture, he picked up the first potion bottle on table, removed the cork top, and downed it in one go. It tasted terrible, but he was excited for the results.
"Ready yourself – everything is going to get very strange for a moment," the healer said. "Tell me when you can see the difference."
Harry could feel something about his eyes changing vaguely – it was almost a sensation of warmth, like his eyes were under warm water while open, and then suddenly he could see absolutely nothing clearly – not even with his glasses. "Yeah, my vision's totally lost all focus now," he said calmly. The explanation made it clear this was to be expected, as the first potion dissolved his current lens entirely.
"Great!" the healer said, "let me hand you the next one – hold out your right hand, and drink it when you're ready. Again, no pain, just a bit of a strange feeling."
Harry felt the second vial placed into his hand, and carefully removed the cork before drinking that one down as well. He handed the vial back to the healer, and removed his glasses, leaving them in his lap.
His eyes started to feel a different kind of warmth and an odd sensation that made him think of fully thickened gelatin wobbling in the buffet line, before suddenly he could see perfectly. No glasses, no pain, nothing – just perfect vision.
Looking around, he smiled widely, and focused back on the healer. "This is amazing! I can see better than ever!"
"I'm happy for you, Mr Potter," the healer replied in her warm voice. "Now, let me run a couple of checks to be sure everything's all right, and you should be good to go for at least four decades, when we can do this again, right?"
Nodding happily, Harry leaned forward and let the healer finish the job.
- Fragments of Thought -
AN:
Hey, presto, this here handy potion destroys the optic nerves and regrows them. What person came up with that fanfic trope? Someone too lazy to stop and think or read a few entries on any web search results?
The lens is the point of focus, if you'll pardon the pun. The lens becomes deformed in some people, causing near- or far-sightedness, and this may in turn reach a point where correction is required (glasses, contacts, surgery). And I believe – but may be wrong – the lens has no nerves.
Once you cross the magic age of 40, your lenses start to be come less flexible due to sulfur cross-linkages in the biological polymers that make up the lens - the same process that makes car tires firm, which is called vulcanization. As the lens becomes less flexible, you get age-induced vision problems and may require reading glasses. It's where the eye doctor says, "congratulations, you've lived long enough to start having vision problems, everyone gets it if they're lucky."
That described moment when nothing is in focus after the first potion? It's what I hear it feels like in cataract surgery, where they remove the lens and prepare to put in a new one.
The nerve would need to be replaced if you were, say, blind from birth or sustained serious head injury. If you needed to do something to the optic nerve to correct near-/far-sightedness, then contacts and surgery wouldn't work. This isn't rocket science. Typical damage to an optic nerve causes a reduction in vision ability, like peripheral or outright dimness.
It's like one fanfic author was feeling too lazy to think, wrote something down, and suddenly it was cut-n-paste trope time across a plethora of stories. Ugh. Really?
Reminder - these one-shot setups are just little exercises for me to get some practice back in for creative writing. No plots here are even remotely fully baked, though some are clearly farther along than others.
