I’ve needed vision correction most of my life.
I have a strong memory of putting on glasses and being able to see the leaves on trees.
Despite the dramatic improvement, I hated wearing glasses as a teen. As soon as I could convince my parents I switched to contact lenses. I wore rigid gas permeables for years, before switching to extended wear softs for a while, and eventually to daily disposables.
I wore contacts basically exclusively from my late teens to my late 30s. I don’t even remember why I decided to get an updated glasses prescription, but at some point I did.
I still wore contacts most days – my glasses living in a case in my bedside table.
Until late 2019.
As COVID grabbed the world’s attention – and there was much speculation and uncertainty about how it spread – I decided that despite being careful about sanitation, sticking my fingers in my eyes twice a day every day was a risk I could easily eliminate.
By the time I considered switching back to contacts, two things had happened. First, my old contacts had passed their expiry date and I’d chucked them out. Second, and more importantly, I had gotten my first set of progressive focus glasses.
Presbyopia is a harsh mistress.
A bit over a month ago I decided to investigate contacts again, and made an appointment at a local optometrist.
I expected to end up with contacts and reading glasses, but learned that multifocal contacts had come a long way, and were only marginally more expensive than single focus. So we started there.
Over the next couple weeks I tried various combinations of distance and reading correction, ultimately finding a prescription that’s “pretty good.” Distance isn’t as good as my glasses, but it’s workable. Near field is similar – workable, but not as good as my glasses.
Annoyingly, this seems as good as it’s likely to get – ok, but very much a tradeoff.
Even more annoyingly, with contacts in you can’t “cheat” and look over/under them. Want to see detail in a piece of art? Getting closer doesn’t help.
As a final experiment I got single vision contacts and a cheap pair of reading glasses, to see if that was the sweet spot. After trying it for a day, running errands around the city and meeting friends for lunch, I can confidently say that reading glasses are not better,
Not even a little bit.
So after all that I’m likely to stick with glasses, at least most of the time. They’re better for reading. They’re better for distance. But they get rain drops on them. And steam up when coming in out of the cold.
And when you take them off to swim, or shower, or get a hair cut, the world closes in and gets very very small.
The optometrist told me that despite the claims in the marketing materials, multifocal contacts “won’t give you back the eyes you had twenty years ago.”
And that, it turns out, is what I really want.
So I guess I’m waiting for the ocular implants Cyberpunk fiction has been promising for decades to become an actual thing.
And when that happens, I hope they come with the option to toggle the world into black and white…