Seeing

[liralen]

I can feel my brain struggling.

For nearly the last decade I've been using the disposable lenses, and when I first moved to them, I chucked the astigmatism part of the correction because disposables didn't have good toric lenses (i.e. lenses that were a bit heavier on the bottom so they'd stay aligned correctly to correct the angle based problems of astigmatism). So I've just lived with the fact that my left eye was significantly worse than my right eye. About... uhm... five years ago, I had them up the prescription to the left eye, and it actually just got kind of worse... which my doc in Boulder figured out the instant she saw my eye.

So we went to lower power lenses again, clearing that mistake out and just recently she said that there were toric disposables out. They're a bit more than twice the price, so I went without the first six months of this year, figuring that I'd be okay. I have really started noticing, however, the difference between the sight in my eyes. So, since I was running out of lenses, and my pre-tax medical account (which I won't be reimbursed for) has a few hundred dollars to burn, I called today to ask what I'd have to do to try the new toric lenses.

They got me in for an appointment at 1:15, and in fifteen minutes, I had a new pair of lenses on that were making my brain go, "Woah!"

Because my brain's lived with the fact that my left hasn't been as good as my right, my normally dominant right eye got really, really dominant. Now I feel a bit like I grew another foot of sight on my left side, and it's taking a bit of getting used to. It was especially fun driving home in intense traffic. It took me a damned half an hour to get out of Boulder, alone, and it was really weird getting all this new data. My. This is pretty cool.

Comments

Interesting.

[elthar.livejournal.com]

I recently returned to wearing mostly contacts after several years in glasses -- I had finally shelled out the bucks for a pair of glasses light enough to wear all day, and eventually got lazy, but now that I'm into tae kwon do, and am doing more business traveling, I decided it'd be a good idea to have contacts available. Coincidentally my glasses developed a nasty hurty ridge on the left earpiece that I've somehow been unable to mitigate.

When getting re-examined, I was given the option of single vision or toric disposables, and got one pair of each to try. My glasses have included a mild astigmatism correction for many years. But I found that I actually saw better with the single-visions, which were thinner and more comfortable to boot. So now I'm pretty much wearing those exclusively, and I could swear that I'm seeing better than I have in recent years with the glasses.

Gotta wonder if the lenses themselves are evening out some irregularity in my corneas, or something.

Good luck with the new eyeballs, I know oh so well how disorienting it can be to adapt to a new prescription...

Re: Interesting.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Oh! Yeah! That's why I tossed out the astigmatism correction in the first place, as the normal spherical lenses were correcting the relatively mild case of astigmatism that I had to at least the point where I was a solid 20/30, and could easily drive and do most stuff.

I'm realizing, now, that the toric has one important fault... when I look down, things get significantly more blurry. Also, when I tilt my head to the side much, things get blurry as well. Plus after each blink there's a very small period of blurriness that I'm probably going to be able to ignore in the long run, but is mildly disorienting. It is amazingly thin, which is what the new technology is supposed to give; however, I'm finding these to be a bit less comfortable, visually, than my normal lenses, but it's only been three days, so I'll give 'em the full week before deciding. The great good thing (given my tendency towards impulse buying) with this doctor is that she's making me try them for the week before ordering anything. I'm also finding that when I get up in the middle of the night, now, when I put on my really old glasses, my left eye can't find the focus anymore, especially for close-up things, and I have to take the glasses off to see things... which is a real bother.

Really odd thing is that without any correction, I still have that extra chunk of conscious left-side vision, now. What the brain can adapt to is pretty impressive.

I found that for active sports, like fencing and soccer, that glasses not only provided an extra place to get hit badly and for unwanted sweat collection, but that I really missed having my peripheral vision that I have with my contact lenses, even the simple sphericals. So I can really see why you swapped to lenses after picking up tae kwon do.

Re: Interesting.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Thinking about this... I should probably just spend the extra money on a new pair of glasses, if I decide not to take the torics.