I tried out my first set of contact lenses in the late 1980s. My only experience was recalling my bonus sister working with her glass contacts on Thanksgiving Day in the mid 1970s. I remember it making a clunk noise as it fell to the table. In High School, I remember some of the wealthier kids, plopping their lenses out and licking them before putting them back.
My first pair were gas permeable. Made of hard plastic. The left lens had a tiny dot on it to remind be where it went. They needed nothing short of a thorough scrubbing every night.
My daughter and her friends would gather round me as I spread a towel, set up a mirror and began the process of aiming for my eye. I knew they were in because they felt like pebbles.
As I was lead to understand it, my eye lids would form actual calluses inside and someday I would manage a full blink without feeling the edges of the pebbles.
After several years in glasses, I gave contacts another go. More ridged gas permeable lenses and these felt more like buttons. Lint, dust, feather attracting buttons. Back to glasses.
The contact lens makers caught up to me and I have been successfully wearing soft contact lenses since around the turn of the century.
A typical day without contacts is okay, I can see most anything and use cheaters to read, around the house, anyway. Walking into a store sans contacts is like living in a blurry fish bowl. There is sweet spot where I can see clearly, seven feet out and things become a soft blur, closer than two feet, forget it without cheaters.
With my contacts on, I can see all the way to the back of the store but everything computer distance and closer is a soft unresolvable blur. I can drive but haven’t seen my dashboard for a number of years.
I ran out of contacts and made an appointment with my eye care professional and complained with all the drama I could muster, that I wanted to see my food when I was eating, but I also wanted to see the television at the same time.
He prescribed multi-focal contact lenses. The kind the man in the television commercial needs in order to read the menu without his wife’s cat-eye cheaters. He said, just wear them, give them a week and come back in. The woman who works the front of the contact lens clinic said she’d mail them to me and I should just wear them. Give them a week.
Being a research and internet junkie, I went home, applied my reading glasses and looked up multi-focal contact lenses. I understood why they said, just wear them.
I’ve read reviews, many of them not very positive. I got the lenses yesterday afternoon. I am just wearing them. I can see the Young and the Restless and I can see the computer, these are two things that have been mutually exclusive for a long time. Once in a while I can see up close.
My brain is cool. It seems to be ignoring the near focus when I look across the room and doing the computer focus reliably while ignoring the distance part of the lens. Close up work is still fleeting but my brain is still adapting. I suspect part of the close up issue has to do with the way I’ve been coping.
I am used to seeing up close through what are essentially, two, magnifying glasses held steady by some Foster Grant Frames. When I manage to get focus through the new lenses, the print is not magnified.
What is my first impression of multi-focals? I’ll tell you next week, till then, the eyes have it.