Howell Charles N Jr Dr OD M Ed

Dr. Howell has been my eye doctor for 30 years. He takes a lot of extra time with each patient, and I’m very appreciative. I have had nothing but great results with the contact lenses and glasses he made for me. Thank you Dr. Howell.

Sweet Jesus in the morning! I can see! I can see!
So I’ve worn glasses since I was 12 and I had a brief flirtation with contacts in high school. I’ve wanted to get back to contacts but my eyes are so dry that, after a couple of hours of wearing them, I look like I just woke up from a 3-​day bender. Dr. Howell recommended a brand of contacts (Biomedics XC, in case you were wondering) that I can comfortably wear all day — with the exception of a recent 13-​hour work day in front of a computer that taxed not only my eyesight but also my brain and my patience. He also recommended that I take daily fish oil supplements which (what a coincidence!) he sells in his office for $ 30 a bottle. Really? $ 30 for fish oil? Despite my newly corrected sight, I didn’t realize it was that expensive until I had already paid for it and the jury’s still out on it helping the dry eye situation. My other options were a $ 50 monthly prescription for Restasis or surgery to plug up my tear drainage ducts. Um… yeah… $ 30 may be doable.
Okay, so this is where the Doctor annoyed the crap out of me. He’s all into homeopathic medicine and is an independent distributor for some sort of «miracle» nutritional supplement whose name escapes me. You’d think that I’d remember since he REALLY likes to talk about it, but after the 3^rd hour of my free radical and antioxidant lecture, I had long since tuned him out. 3 hours. I am not kidding.
The office is, like, 5 minutes away from my house. I always seem to miss it heading south on University because it’s surrounded by trees that block the sign and it’s set at an angle facing away from the road, so it’s really 5 minutes and a u-​turn away from my house.
Also, Howell’s a nice guy and his staff is friendly, but they also like to share personal information. As a first-​time patient, I didn’t really need to know (nor did I care) that the Doctor was going through a pretty rough divorce and that his soon-​to-​be ex-​wife is cuckoo for cocoa puffs. On my second visit, I was informed that the usual receptionist is on bed rest because she’s pregnant with a ginormous baby which is putting pressure on her bladder causing her to pee every 5 minutes and that the fill-​in receptionist has had 5 miscarriages so she and her husband are now content just raising dogs… Yorkshire terriers, to be exact.