Recently I’ve been having trouble with my contact lenses. I’ve
worn them so long – over 50 years –
that most of the time I don’t even think
about how different the world looks when my vision isn’t corrected. Like many
people, I’m extremely near-sighted, and I also have astigmatism. So what I see before
I put my lenses in is not only generally blurred, but consists of overlapping
images of different sharpness. My hard contact lenses (Rigid Gas Permeable) deal
nicely with these problems. For decades, I waltzed through life without having
to wrestle with how clearly I can see.
I’d heard about the importance of looking away, blinking, or
even using lubricant eye drops while working for long hours at the computer.
Apparently we don’t blink as often as we normally do when we’re staring that
the screen. That “tired eyes” sensation is not due to fatigue but to dryness.
In my case, this was made worse by the natural drying-out of eyes with age (and
the hormonal changes of menopause), and made even more worse by the number of
hours I normally wear my lenses. Wearing them daily – washing my hands and putting
them in every morning; washing my hands, cleaning them, and leaving them to
soak every night – had become so much a part of each routine, I never thought
about it. That’s one of the good things about habit – I reliably got my teeth
flossed and brushed, my night time medications taken, and all the other daily self-care
things. The down side of such habits is that they’re hard to break or to modify.
So when my optometrist advised me to take them out for a couple of hours in the
middle of the day, I blithely and optimistically agreed. I set out to do so
with all the good intentions in the world. The problem was that there was no
time in my daily routine that I could easily and automatically add this
contacts-lens-break.
The other problem, perhaps even more of an obstacle, was
that although I do have a pair of back-up spectacles (I’m wearing them now), the
prescription is old and my vision has changed, so they don’t give me good
correction. In addition, the lenses are so thick, they distort objects, the
most disorienting being the keyboard of my piano, which appears to be
bowl-shaped! So, naturally, all my good intentions went by the wayside.
