Why yes, I have just arrived from the 19th Century in shiny things

Aug. 2, 2019, 12:34 p.m.
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Well, maybe mid-20th century, since contact lenses became available to the masses in the 1950s-60s, although Wikipedia tells me that Leonardo da Vinci actually introduced the idea in 1508. His process involved submerging your head in a bowl of water, though, which is not a very practical means of vision correction. Let’s just say that although I have had contacts since I was 15, which has been quite some time ago, I have been living in the Contact Lens Dark Ages: I’ve had hard contacts for all these many years. Yes, hard/rigid gas permeable contacts - they still exist! And they existed in my eyes until four days ago!

I’d always been told by my eye doctor that if you weren’t having problems with hard contacts, they were the way to go since your vision is sharper with hard ones than with soft ones. So I never seriously considered switching teams until I started having problems. Lots and lots of problems. Well, one big problem, in that I constantly, constantly had smeary shit all over them. I’d clean them, I’d put them in, they would be fine for a few minutes… then a smeary blurry film would obscure my vision again. I’d clean them again- same thing. After we’d gone though that about a gazillion times, hours later it would be mostly okay. Or I’d be used to it. But it was REALLY REALLY annoying, as you might imagine. This has been going on for ages. It’s actually been a recurring problem for years, but it’s never lasted long and I usually blamed allergies, and at one time switching cleaning solution took care of it. That in itself was difficult - about all you can get for hard contacts these days is Bausch and Lomb, but after some “smeary shit on my contacts” research, I found this one weird brand called Menicare that you can only get online but people raved about. And it DID take care of the issue for quite awhile. Then it quit taking care of it. My eyes also feel very dry most of the time, which I’m sure made the problem worse, and eye drops weren’t helping much either.

And yes I do have glasses, which I occasionally resort to. While my dad was in ICU then in Hospice, I totally gave up on the contacts and just wore my glasses for at least a month. I hate wearing glasses but I couldn’t deal with my contacts plus everything else. I also had an eye doctor appointment at the end of April, but had to change it twice because I was in Asheville with my dad, and the last change had me pushed to the end of July because they are always really really booked up.

SO, I finally had my appointment Monday and told them about my woes, and they are all, “Let’s put you in soft contacts! Do you want the multi-focus ones so you don’t have to wear reading glasses with them?”

....OMG!!! Yes, YES, I am obviously really out of the loop, but the last time my eye doctor discussed bifocal contacts, he didn’t recommend them because they were often uncomfortable, and didn’t work that well anyhow. This incidentally was my former In The Mall eye doctor, who I ditched a couple of years ago for several other reasons - the main one being his mentioning casually that my mild macular degeneration was no worse, when I had no idea that I even HAD macular degeneration. I did have some weird retina things which he’d been keeping an eye on for a number of years, but he’d never said it was macular degeneration. He’d called it other things (I forget what now and am too lazy to go look) and I suppose I could have figured out it was the same thing as, or a part of, macular degeneration, but at that point I decided maybe I’d better switch to a real ophthalmologist instead of going to the guy in the mall.

My other astonishment was that the contact woman just went over to a big cabinet and....handed me fancy-smancy multi-focus contacts!! I fully expected I’d have to order them and wait a week or two, like I do with my hard ones, but no! They have a big magic cabinet full of all the prescriptions possible!!! Okay, not all since they didn’t have the exact one for my left eye, so gave me a close one and ordered the correct one. Which took a day, not a week. And actually still isn’t quite right, as my distance vision isn’t great, but I go back Monday for a re-test and they’ll adjust it then.

But, BUT… I can see to read and I can see my computer and I can see whatever else I need to see close up without wearing reading glasses!!! This is SO AMAZING - I have had to wear readers WITH contacts for like ten years now at least, which is pretty much the most annoying thing ever, especially as for some reason I did not expect to ever need reading glasses, because I had contacts. So for all these years, if I don’t have readers handy I can forget reading anything. It’s beyond thrilling to be able to, say, go into the grocery store and NOT have to turn right around and go back to the car for my reading glasses so I can see what I’m buying! I still keep trying to push my readers on top of my head every time I get up from the computer, which is pretty funny as they are not on my face anymore.

Plus no smeary shit, plus my eyes feel SO much better - not dry and scratchy! And it’s affordable! There was so much to process the day of the exam that I didn’t get an exact quote, and started really worrying that after falling madly in love, I would discover that they cost like $80 a month. I know normal soft contacts aren’t outrageous, but these are fancy multi-focus ones!! To my vast relief I discovered yesterday that with my mediocre eye insurance plus a rebate from the contact makers if you order a year’s worth at a time, it will only be $100 for a year’s supply - I probably spend more than that replacing the reading glasses I constantly lose/break!

SO that’s my current excitement. I need to make a work entry, especially after we got some quite shocking news yesterday – someone making an abrupt and unplanned departure – but as I’ve gone on and on in raptures over my new futuristic contacts, I’ll leave it for another day. And here’s a picture of Phillip for your viewing pleasure - he’s doubling in size daily, and is a terror, but awwwwwwwwww –

Well, my camera roll doesn’t seem to be updating on Flickr all of a sudden, so these are a couple of weeks old, but still. He’s just like this but even bigger-