AITA for snapping at my optician after she laughed at my eye prescription and showed it to her coworkers?

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I (29F) am severely nearsighted, and it’s been a huge insecurity for me my entire life.

For context, I’ve never met anyone with worse vision than mine. Whenever I tell people my prescription, it’s always met by ‘WHAAAT’, ‘No way!, ‘Are you legally blind?’ and it’s always made me feel embarrassed and singled out.

When I was younger, I started lying about my prescription and telling people it was much lower than it actually is, just so I wouldn’t feel so different.

Recently, I needed new glasses, and since I live out of town and just visitng back home, my mom took me to the optician she goes to regularly. At the store, the woman working there took my current glasses to measure the prescription. She looked at them and immediately chuckled and said, ‘These are quite thick, aren’t they?’ Then, after she checked them and saw the prescription printed out, she chuckled again and said, ‘Wow, you’re VERY blind’.

I was already uncomfortable, but then I saw her take my glasses and the measurement slip to the back and briefly show them to a few coworkers. They leaned in, looked at it, and giggled. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it was pretty clear they were reacting to how strong my prescription was.

At that point, I was genuinely upset. When she came back, I snapped and told her that I found her comments about my vision, and laughing about a patient’s prescription and showing it to other staff like it was a joke, rude and unprofessional.

She looked shocked and said she was “just fascinated” because it’s not often she sees someone so young with eyesight this bad. My mom got uncomfortable and tried to smooth things over.

After we left, my mom told me that this is her local optician and that I embarrassed her. She said I overreacted, that the woman didn’t mean anything by it, and that I should’ve just ignored it or laughed it off instead of making a scene. She also said that if someone points out that she has thick glasses and horrible eyesight, she wouldn’t be upset as those are just facts, and you “can’t get upset about facts,” and that I need to get over this childhood insecurity.

I’m honestly hurt that she doesn’t have my back too. It feels easy for her to say when her prescription is only around -7 and her glasses look pretty normal. Mine is -15. My lenses are soo thick, my eyes look tiny, and the distortion from the lenses just screams to the world how bad my eyes are and I hate how self-conscious I am of them.

But I just feel like a medical professional should know better than to mock or gossip about a patient, especially right in front of them as what they joke about could be a sensitive subject for many people.

So AITA for snapping at the optician for this or is my insecurity making me unreasonably sensitive about this issue?

90schilhood

90schilhood