Tag: Contact Lenses

In short, I gave up.

In the first post I mentioned that I felt OK with the single vision lenses but that I hadn’t tried driving with them in. As soon as I did, I started to notice problems.

The main one was that I couldn;t focus on vehicles following behind using the internal mirror: it just stayed blurred. The other, more troubling, artifact was dazzling at night and coronas around car lights. The first time out at night I had to pull over and take them out. It was downright dangerous.

After a further consultation it became apparent that I am actually left eye dominant whereas the optician (and I) previously thought I was right eye dominant. That explained the problem with the mirror: the left eye had a distance vision lense. After some discussion, we moved to varifocal toric lenses. However these were monthly’s and took 10 days to obtain.

I really tried to get on with these, but the night vision problems remained and my vision just wasn’t as good as with glasses. Eventually I admitted defeat until something new comes along.

I’ve been wearing glasses for about 15 years now. I have classic Presbyopia: also known as short arms 🙂 My distance vision is still nearly perfect in one eye and not much worse in the other. My close up vision has been deteriorating for about 16-17 years though.

I moved over to Varifocals years ago because I was fed up with having to take my glasses off to look at somebody across a table and then having to put them back on to read a laptop screen. More recently I’ve had to add dedicated reading glasses and mid-vision computer glasses for when I’m at home and using two big monitors. I’ve been considering switching to contact lenses for some time, and after a friend of mine also made the change and reported back that was all was well, I decided to stop hovering and to jump in.

My prescription was pretty current, so it was simply a matter of talking it through with the optometrist in Boots; trying out some test glasses; and saying yes. Pretty painless so far.

I’ve got single-use mono-vision lenses. The right hand one is optimised for distance and the left hand one is a compromise between reading and computer work. I had them fitted yesterday and spent a couple of hours with them in.

I had no major difficulties putting them in or taking them out. Once I had got used to handling them it was straightforward. It appears that I don’t mind touching my eyeball, so that’s good.

It was strange for the first few minutes but then my brain started to adjust for the differences, and by the end of the two hours I could see clearly and focus at all distances. I didn’t drive and I didn’t try the computer monitors though. That’s a job for today.