The doctor shrugs, takes a hair sample from Dale's scalp for DNA purposes, and walks into the next room. In about 15 more minutes, the doctor returns with a large off-white pill and a small cup of pale green liquid. He said told Dale, "Alright, now, take this, and you'll have your chameleon eyes within minutes."
Dale eagerly took the tablet and cup in hand. "This is so exciting, I've always wondered how an animal sees the world, and I've heard chameleons have some of the best vision of all!" He swallowed the pill and the liquid in one great gulp. "Plus, those big swiveling eyes just look so cool.
"Well, I hope having them will be cool," mused the doctor. One of the hard parts of working at Animalia INC is that sometimes it felt like being a literal or tricky genie from the old stories. Sure, people came in to get transformations they said they wanted, but if they didn't like their transformation in hindsight -- too bad, it was permanent.
Sitting upright on the med table, Dale idly kicked his legs and twiddled his fingers. "So, doc, when is this gonna-- WHOA!" All at once, in mid-sentence, Dale's human eyes had squelched out to his left and right, showing him the sides of the exam room much more clearly but also making his depth perception wonky and making it harder to see right in front of him. He continued, "I think it's starting, this feels weird!"
No shit! -- thought the doctor, who had enough bedside manner not say that out loud. "Tell me if you feel any pain or discomfort," the medical professional offered instead with a concerned voice, despite never having seen or heard of a transformation going wrong.
"I think I'm okay, Doc," said Dale, already impressed with how much he could see with just his eyes pointing outward in a wider angle from each other like this. But surely there was more to it? Chameleons didn't have just wide-set human eyes, they had--
Dale's eyelids began to flutter. Then they became harder to keep open. At last he couldn't, and they forcibly closed with greater force than Dale's eyelid muscles could overcome. Dale reached up and felt at his closed eyes. His eyelashes were falling out, and soon even the crease where his eyelids connected to stay closed was getting harder to feel. Before he knew it, he was left with an unbroken layer of skin over each eye, as though he would never open them again, even as the eyes themselves began to swell larger inside him.
"Doctor! I'm blind! My eyelids -- fused? I can't see a thing!"
"Chameleons' eyelids are fused and don't have the two halves we blink together on human eyes," the doctor gently explains. "They do have a hole that leaves the pupil uncovered which should form on you any moment now. They also have a nictitating which is kind of like an eyelid though."
Dale's eyes kept swelling under his skin until they were bulging out into large orbs to either side of his head. Then he felt them twitch underneath their fused eyelid-coverings which made him take his hands away. Within another few seconds, he felt a very mild pinprick-like feeling in the center of the bulged skin, as though it were getting pierced from the outside or inside, he wasn't sure which. And all at once Dale could see again.
It wasn't exactly quite "seeing" at first. Colors and shapes were flashing around him, getting whisked in and out of view by his swiveling eyes. Occasionally an object would come into focus and then immediately back out again as each lens practiced zooming in and out. But finally, Dale managed to bring each eye to a rest and work the blurriness out of the scene he was looking at. Which was much weirder this time.
To Dale's right, he could see the exam room door, which was in fact not directly beside him but actually much further back than he was sitting. His new eyes could look backwards! Moreover, to Dale's "left" (that is, out of his left eye) he could see the ceiling where it met the wall beside his med-table. It made Dale feel weirdly lopsided at first, to have one eye aimed toward his back right and the other staring toward his upper left. He thought: this is weird, I want to see in front of me again. And just like that, Dale's two eyes snapped forward and adjusted their focus to match each other, bringing his depth perception back up to its normal level.
"Getting accustomed to your panoramic vision yet?" came the doctor's voice from in front of him but also to his right. To Dale's surprised, only his right eye automatically moved to see the doctor, and Dale was once again left seeing two directions at once.
"Panoramic?" Dale asked. His right eye looked the doctor up and down from head to feet and back up again, while his left eye darted toward the back wall, confirming he could see behind himself on his left side, too.
"It means all the way around. Well, maybe not entirely all the way around, and maybe not all at once, but chameleon's are famous for being able to look in nearly any two directions they choose, simultaneously. I assume that's part of why you wanted to see like them?"
Dale answered, "Yeah, of course, but ... it's still going to take some getting used to." The doctor could certainly understand that.