Yes, I was actually rather pleased to get the diagnosis.
I went in for the final evaluation before Lasik, and the surgeon had just returned from a seminar where they found that, for my degree of correction, you would have to have corneas as thick as a paperback book to start with, or no go.
(I exaggerate slightly). But he turned me down for Lasik, and recommended implanted lenses. Which I am now getting, and insurance will pay for it!
Retinal detachment is not a Good Thing - before my cataract surgery, I am being referred to a retinal specialist to see if he needs to solder my retinas in place with a laser after they remove the corneas.
Old age sucks. Fortunately I often forget that this is the case.
I will have to look into these.
I have those clip-on ones that sort of claw around each lens, but they can be a pain to get on & off. The husband gets “transitions” but has trouble if he’s going in & out of buildings or driving through tunnels – they don’t lighten up quick enough.
I’m near-sighted and failed miserably at contact use. I kept putting nicks in the soft ones, but could never get used to the feel of the rigid ones. Bummer.
I *used to *be able to read with the glasses on. Now it’s a pain because if I’m shopping & want to see a price tag, I need to slip the glasses on & off constantly. I hate it! Sitting at the computer or walking around home or the office, I get by without them. I do my best to recognize people down the hallway from their coloring or size. Sometimes I’m wrong.
I’m not currently a candidate for lasik because my prescription recently changed. But it’s not much of a loss because I’m a major squeamish wimp when it comes to my eyes, anyway.
On another note, my 79-year old mother has worn glasses since she was about 2. She had mono-vision & wouldn’t leave the house without her contacts. One eye for distance, the other for close-up. Wreaks havoc on 3D movie watching ability. Since cataract removal & lens implant surgery about a year ago she’s glasses-free for the first time in her life. Go Mom!
I started wearing my glasses to swim about the second time I almost knocked myself out running into the side of the pool. Then, too, I swim in lakes and it’s way to easy for me to get out of sight of shore. I have a strap that holds them securely on my head without looking too nerdy.
Yeah, but I consider myself pretty lucky, when you look at my genetic heritage. My dad had his first retinal detachment at 33, and I’m older than that now, and my correction is worse. He spent 6 months in bed, in the dark, in the early 80’s. Nowadays you just go have the surgery done and you wear a little Zorro mask for a day! My dad has had several detachments over the years, so I always have the eye doc check my retinas very carefully. So far they’re thin, but OK.
My glasses are on a shelf in the same spot in the bathroom during showering, and in the top drawer of the nightstand during sleeping. They are safe from kitty paws that way. One of my critters will grab them and run if I give him long enough to think about it (oooh, shiny! and clackety! fun!) - so I don’t. Otherwise, they’re on my face. I buy attractive (many compliments) frames, but make sure they’re sturdy and don’t slide easily. I have a job that could be perilous to glasses if they’re not fairly snug on my face. So far in 11 years I had one Labrador manage to whack me in the face with his head and dislodge them, bent the frames a little, but still didn’t completely fall off my face.
I can wear contacts, but only for about 8 hours comfortably due to mild dry eye. Since I tend to work 10 hours a day, which would mean 12 hours of wearing minimum, they’re uncomfortable. My eyes start to feel tired and sandpapery and unhappy right at the 10 hour mark. So I just don’t bother. Lasik was mentioned as an option at one point, but I know 2 people who have had unhappy results, plus at the time of discussion I would only have gotten about 10-12 years without needing to add reading glasses, anyway, so the cost effectiveness wasn’t worth it. Even the tiny fraction of possibility of ending up with night vision or double-vision is far too frightening to me.
How Do People Who Really Need Glasses Cope Without Them?
I can’t find my glasses without my glasses…at least not by sight. I’m sure I’m not legally blind, but when the cats knock the glasses around I feel about very carefully on the floor until I find them. I learned, very quickly, that when my glasses are off, they are to go into some kind of enclosed area, whether it’s a drawer or a cupboard, whatever.
The last time my glasses broke I couldn’t do anything at all. I can read without them, but that’s about it. And that last time I was panicky as hell after just a couple of hours without them. I don’t think I’ve ever had a panic attack, but that was probably as close as I’ve been. My boyfriend at the time was amazingly calm about it, took me everywhere, took care of me; he wore glasses too, so I think he understood a little bit.
True story: I was diagnosed with bad vision when I was 8; I knew I had sub-sub-par vision for at least a year or two before that. So that first appointment, the doctor told me and my mom that my eyesight was never going to get better, but would always get worse. So to me that meant I’d be blind by, oh, about 20. I spent all of grade school walking to school with my eyes closed while my brothers told me when I was getting close to a curb.
Being nearsighted has definitely affected my life and outlook, but not too terribly. I don’t pay ANY attention at all to how people look, for example, and tend to glance at the whole thing and get a big, general read. I’m rarely wrong, but I’m one of those people that won’t notice a new haircut or hair colour unless the cut is a mohawk and/or the colour is purple, let’s just put it that way.
Before I got my eyes zapped, everything more than about 5 inches from my face was fuzzy at best, and I sometimes had difficulty identifying people’s faces at more than about 4 feet. Generally, I coped by never, ever being without my glasses or contacts.
That said, for mundane activities around the home, simply remembering where everything is can carry you a long way, as long as no one moves stuff. As a bonus, I could navigate my home and find things pretty well in total darkness. For showering, shaving, and such…well, I was terribly nearsighted long before I needed to shave, and I learned to shave by Braille in the shower, more or less. Even now, I mostly shave with my eyes shut and trust my fingers to tell me if I miss a spot.
Those straps are great. Story: Once upon a time, my family went on a canoeing trip on the Buffalo River in Arkansas. A surge of snowmelt had hit it and it was actually running too fast for canoeing, but we were already on our way before they closed it. Mid-morning found me and my father clinging one-handed to a boulder and hanging on to an overturned canoe, trying to catch our breath and figure out how to right it, while my head rang from the canoe landing on it. A passing kayaker got stuck briefly on a log, and managed to ask us how we had managed to keep our glasses on.
I don’t even have to click the link to see that there is no way anybody’s selling my prescription for under $75. I pay over $200 PER LENS for the basic prescription. My actual lenses cost more because I add in variable focus, which would of course not be needed under water unless I were planning to read there. Add to that, I only go someplace where I might snorkel maybe every other year, by which time the original lens would be outdated.
Nope. I have ever since I went to a beach in Florida when I was a teenager. I went swimming at the beach in Tampa, and got far enough away from my family that I couldn’t find them. I looked toward the shore, and realized that I had no way of knowing whether I was in the same place along the shore as I’d started out in. I was almost a thousand miles from home and couldn’t see, and would have a lot of trouble finding anyone who could help me. Fortunately, I found my mom after a little while, and stuck close to her after that. Ever since, I’ve worn my glasses when I go swimming. That was scary.
I don’t do any water activities except swimming in fairly still water, and water aerobics. I’ve never been whitewater rafting or anything like that, and I never plan to. Never been snorkeling, probably never will. I’m not much of an outdoors type.
My prescription is about -3. I can read without my glasses, but not much else. I can’t recognize people. I can tell that there’s a speedometer and stuff on the dashboard of a car, if I’m in the driver’s seat, but I can’t read them.
Terrible eyesight (myopic). The post about close-up work being easy is very true; I used to paint tiny details on metal miniatures with my unassisted right eye (my favorite: painting the diamond pattern on a rattlesnake about 1/2 inch long).
Had my heavy prescription glasses stolen one day when I was at college. I have no idea what value they had to anyone else, so I assume it was just a fratboy prank…“Hey, this guy fell asleep at the engineering computer lab, let’s blind him!”
Spent a week squinting at blurs until I could get home and get new glasses. Highlights included attending archery practice – a friend offered condolences for my inability to participate, whereupon I picked up a bow and arrow, aimed for the center of the colored blur, raised the aiming point to where I thought it would account for the usual range, and let fly. The arrow was invisible to me, but my friend blurted, “HOW do you do that?”
Inspired by this, I signed up for the shooting gallery when our group of friends was at the amusement park later that week. I took the trusty little rifle and blasted away at the blurry shapes moving back and forth, but the carny running the thing rushed over and demanded, “What are you DOING?” He showed me that each target had a little bullseye disc at its base we were supposed to aim at; I had been totally unaware of the discs and was blowing the hell out of his mechanical ducks.
My experiences are mostly the same as the ones above but I have solutions to two common problems:
Not being able to find your glasses without your glasses.
When you buy a new pair of glasses, keep the old pair. (I keep mine in my nighttable.) If the primary pair goes missing, slide on your old pair (even if they aren’t quite the same strength, it should be fine), find your good pair and put the old pair back in the night stand.
Sunglasses with glasses.
Again, when you need to buy a new pair of glasses, have them coat the old pair with a UV coating. Turns them into sunglasses. This only works well if your eyes haven’t changed much, though.
My lenses (without frames) run me about 400 dollars so getting two pairs at a time is just not happening.
Right. When I was a kid and first got them (7 or so) I used to sit on them, lose them, break them, everything imaginable. Our optical shop had an “insurance” thing that if you broke them beyond repair within the first 6 months you got a new pair for free. Needless to say we got a lot more out of the insurance than we paid into it :smack:
But now I use contacts during the day and glasses in the evening/night. I’m about a -6, so I can see thing blurrily - enough to shower and such if I’m doing so without contacts. I run my hands along my legs after shaving to see if I missed any spots.
And yes, I’ve called the SO if I can’t find my glasses. He wears them too but he’s much more diligent than I am about glasses since I’m usually in contacts.
I don’t swim much. Are there not goggles that would fit over you glasses? I would’ve thought those would be quite common.
And, yeah, I don’t need to see to wash by body. Then again, I can see the blobs that are the bottles of shampoo and soap. But people who try on my glasses think I must be blind, so I think I qualify.
(Incidentally, people say they can see perfectly out of my glasses if the cross their eyes. I still do not understand how this works. First off, I do not have a lazy eye or anything like that. I’m just plain nearsighted with a bit of astigmatism. Second, If crossing your eyes can let them see, why can’t diverging my eyes make it where I can see without glasses?)
I’m at about a -6.5, and I started out around a -2 when I was in the third grade and couldn’t read the board. Early on, my “can’t find my glasses” prevention was centered around having a highly visible eyeglass case. For years, I had a bright fuschia case that did not blend in with anything I owned. Later on, I ended up with a fancier pair of glasses that came in a black case. My solution? Spray paint a couple of big white dots onto the case so they’d be easy to find. These days, my cases for my glasses are a frosted-look white plastic and easy to find. I did, however, pick up the “memorizing where everything is” trick and the “do a lot of stuff by feel” routine. Even when I have glasses or contact lenses on, I will just feel around in a bag instead of looking because it’s faster for me.
I domeverything possible with my glasses on. When I’m asleep, they’re always within reach. I am allergic to and dislike cats, so nomproblem there. In the shower there’s nothing I really need to see with absolute clarity.
My left eye is a lot worse than my right, due to uneven pellucid marginal degeneration. If I need to see something clearly, I close my left eye. Of course, I should be wearing RGP contact lenses, but they’re a fel bitch with allergies–feel like sandpaper, honestly, even after I went through the adjustment period–and so I muddle on without them. It’s amazing what you can adjust to.
The question I have, which is semi-related–is how the hell do people who need glasses manage to lose them? I’ve had them since I was eight, and I haven’t lost them since the first week I had them. I only put them in a couple of places. Ever. Nightstand, or bathroom sink. Never-the-fuck-ever anywhere else. It’s drilled into my head like a commandment.
