I'm Wearing Glasses

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Ugh. Well, I now own a set of corrective lenses. This is going to take some time to get used to. They’re actually no-line bifocals, with the top for the computer monitor and the bottom for “close-up” reading. Maybe that was a mistake. I mean, it’s OK, for reading a book, because that’s a relatively small area. But for the monitor I’m moving my head around a lot in order to keep the area I’m looking at in focus. Yikes. I don’t quite have a headache, but I can feel some strain. I guess I’m still getting used to it.

I got these things because afternoon office work has become very tiring lately. Specifically, eye-tiring. Hey, I’m 41 (as of last Sunday), so it was bound to happen. The preverbial “straw” that drove me to the doctor’s office happened a couple of weeks ago when I bought a new paperback, and when I started to read it just before bedtime, I was hardly able to make it through a couple of pages. That f****ing print was just to darned small.

Last night I was able to read that same paperback with normal effort. Aaah!! At least that part’s working for me. Now I just have to get used to using them here at work.

Anyone else out there have any good stories of when you started to wear glasses or contacts?

2

I’ve worn glasses since I was a wee tyke, and finally got contacts when I was 19. For the five years before I got contacts, I wore PhotoGray lenses, an older version of those Transition ones they have now.

I walked out of the eye doc’s office with my fresh new contacts in, into a bright, snow covered, sunny day and instantly teared up and overdosed on sunlight.

Next stop: the mall for some shades.

I have an astigmatism, and wear disposables now. So I have to wear Toric lenses, which have to lined up a certain way in your eye.

::blatant commercial plug to follow::

For a couple years, I was wearing a different brand and was subject to the off-center, slightly out of focus effect when they drifted from the correct position. I saw recently a commercial for an new Acuvue lens (Advantage) that claimed to reduce this, and ordered a couple boxes.

Holy hell, I am in love with these things now. In the first three weeks wearing them, I haven’t had them spin out of alignment once.

3

I’ve worn glasses for 46 years. :eek:

Before then, the World was always blurry, but I thought everyone saw it the same way. Then I started school and becasue I sat in the back row, I couldn’t see anything clearly on the chalkboard. I could have been labelled dumb, but luckily I sat in the front row when someone was away. When I got everything right, my teacher realised what was going on.

The problem was that ‘my eye muscles were too tight’. Now I’m getting on a bit, they’ve started to relax, so my eyesight is gradually improving.

P.S. Quick hint: when asked a tricky question, play for time by cleaning your lenses!

4

I’ve worn glasses now for just over 32 years, since I was 9 and a half. A few months back, I realised I was able to read better without my glasses – my eyes just could focus with my existing lenses (I’m near-sighted). Trotted along to the optometrist – and I needed either bifocals or progressive lenses, my choice. I chose progressives because of the “no line” thing.

Reading and computer work isn’t a biggie now, but walking along supermarket aisles – eh. I certainly have to bob my head up and down to read the labels. Price of being an old fart, I guess! :slight_smile:

5

I’d’ve never thought that would be possible. You think you’ll get to the point where you won’t need glasses at all?

6

Recently, Mr2U learned all about the wonderfulness of glasses.

See, Mr2U can’t see close. When we go to restaurants, we send Kid2U to the other side of the dining room with the menu so Mr2U can decide what to order. That’s the only way he can see it. :rolleyes: In the past few years, he’s taken to reading the newspapers looking just like this silhouette of Sherlock Holmes.. But he doesn’t smoke a pipe. Just Marlboros. And he doesn’t wear a goofy hat either. It would mess up his ponytail.

All of us, the friends2U, familymembers2U, etc. have been begging him for YEARS to break down and get some of those inexpensive magnifying glasses like you can get at Walmart or Walgreens and he finally did. No more would he have to look so dorky and be the subject of ridicule! We were all so thrilled!!! When our friends at the bar found out, they bought us many beers in congratulations! He wasn’t thrilled so much, but hey - at 48, you’d better just suck it up I told him! :smiley:

He likes reading the paper now! God forbid he ever pick up an actual BOOK, but at least he’s reading SOMETHING!

7

I started wearing glasses in 6th grade (that would make me 10 or 11). First it was just for nearsightedness. Then, when I was about 35, I needed correction for astigmatism. When I reached 45, I got bifocals.

8

My left eye is quite a bit worse than my right, so I wore contacts for several years, but my eyes started getting really irritated and dry, and I spend a lot of time at a computer, so I picked up a pair of glasses. I’d been told adjusting to them would probably be very difficult, but a couple of days and I was fine. No headaches or anything, just everything looked weird for awhile.

I wish I’d done it years ago. My eyes are a lot happier, and my vision is fine. I’m far too cowardly (besides broke) to go for surgery, so glasses it is.

9

Hey, welcome to “Old.” :wink:
I’ll be 41 in November, and while I’ve been wearing glasses (and contacts) since I was in 3rd or 4th grade, I just got bifocals this Spring. I nearly died when the eye doctor said I needed them.

Have some Geritol.

10

I got glasses in third grade, when I couldn’t read the blackboard anymore. One curious thing was that for a number of years, I would get terribly carsick on roadtrips. After I got my glasses, I was never sick again.

Well, only when we drove with our friend Roger, but that was because of his random braking habit.

One possible benefit of being nearsighted is that, at 44, I still don’t need reading glasses.

11

Like most important revelations in life, my need for glasses was discovered in a bar.

Some friends and I were hanging out in The Sawmill, when one of them told me to “take a look at that sign over there”.

“What, the one way on the other side of the bar? You can’t read that from here”, I informed him.

“Umm, yes, I can. Apparently you can’t read that from here. That ain’t good, dude. You need glasses.”

“Glasses schmasses…I can see just fine.” Still, it nagged at me. A few beers later, I had a brainstorm.

“Hey Tara,” I said to one of our friends there…“You carry glasses in your purse, right? Give 'em here.”

I tried on her glasses, and wham! The world came into focus. I hadn’t even realized it had gone out of focus (probably due to The Sawmill’s 25-cent draft beer policy), but suddenly that sign that had eluded me earlier was crystal clear.

I spent the next two weeks wearing Tara’s oversized lime green glasses until I got around to going to the eye doc. I received a stern talking-to for wearing someone else’s glasses, especially Tara’s, as they turned out to be a very specialized prescription – each lens was vastly different from the other. They tested me out, and found out…well, I needed a prescription with each lens vastly different from the other. In a rather astounding coincidence, she and I needed identical oddball prescriptions.

I’ve since ditched the lime-green frisbee-sized frames for something a little more stylish, though.

12

Thanks.

So … am I supposed to chug this stuff like a brewski, or do I pour it in a shot glass? :smiley:

13

Mix it with your Metamucil.

14

I’ve worn glasses for nearsightedness since I was eight or nine. I went through a few years of contacts in my teens, but had a bad reaction to some kind of lens solution, and had to go back to glasses. I got my first pair of bifocals a couple of years ago, sometime around my 40th birthday. The top half is for distance, and the bottom half is for reading/cross-stitch. In retrospect, though, I probably should have looked into trifocals, so that I have something for the computer monitor, but the stupid eye doctor (I really don’t trust optometrists, but I just wanted glasses with no surgery and the office was close) insisted I didn’t even need bifocals. He claimed I was “much too young” to need them, and didn’t seem to hear me say that my eyes were in physical pain when I had to switch back and forth between near and far all the time.

I picked up the bifocals on a Friday, and tried to wear them all weekend. “Tried to” is the key word there. Having worn glasses on a daily basis for more than 30 years, the experience of glasses was not new to me in the least. However, I couldn’t see anything, close up or far away, regardless of how I tilted my head. I also had a constant headache, which was cured only by going back to my single-vision glasses and pulling them off whenever I needed to see something close at hand.

Monday afternoon, I went in to see the optician at the same office. The optician at this place is the best optician I have ever known, which is one reason I go there for glasses even with no MDs on staff. He checked my records, checked the glasses, and went back and huddled with the optometrist. He came back and told me that the doctor had written the wrong prescription, with virtually no correction for the close-up half, but that they were going to do another vision test and replace the lenses, on the house. I picked up the glasses the next day, had the optician adjust the angle, and I’ve been wearing them well ever since.

My advice: While it is not unusual to need some adjustment period with any new pair of glasses, if you continue to have problems after a day or two, go visit the optician where you got the glasses. I have found that optometrists know about as much about glasses as doctors know about medicine–lots of theory, with noso much practical experience. On the other hand, the opticians are trained primarily in lens technology, much like a pharmacist is trained in drugs, and are more likely to recognize existing problems, especially with new lenses.

15

Stupid, indeed. I’ve worn bifocals since i was twenty-one, and I’ve had friends who’ve worn them practically all their lives. Age is not an indication of “bifocal wear”. (Been wearing the damn things for 15 years; you’d think I’d be used to them by now, but noooo, I still have problems going down stairs and stuff. Sheesh.)
Please tell me you’re not going back to that hack, especially since you said

Doctors that don’t listen to me get scratched right off my “will do business with again” list.
GAH that irritates me to no end.

A trick my optician told me: don’t try out the new glasses right away unless you have to. Start using them the next day, first thing, rather than “right now”. Your eyes tend to “adjust” to your current prescription during the day, so even if you put on better glasses, after a few hours of wearing your old ones, you’ll probably see much worse. But, if you start wearing them first thing the next day, you’ll notice how much better they are.
It’s usually worked for me, too - except that one time when my eyes changed so much that I was better off not wearing anything {-10.5 L, -10.75 R; in lay terms, my eyesight uncorrected is about 20 / 12,500 or so) than to wear the “old” glasses, and oooohhhhh did it feel and look niiiiiiiiiice to wear the new ones right away.

16

I started wearing my glasses in 4th grade. I come from a family notorious for bad eyes, and all the reading Id been doing (and still do). I was the first in my class to get glasses, and at the time was rather proud of that.

As time went on, my eyes changed DRAMATICALLY. Every year Id go in and get new lenses. They finally slowed down around 8th grade, and since then I go in every other year and have only had to get new lenses once. Now, my eyes are worse than my dads, and my lenses are super thick. Wearing the non-thinned lenses isnt even possible, they’d be too heavy. I am not quite as bad as my mother, but Im tied for the worst eyes out of everyone Ive traded glasses with (the other guys glasses, other than the size, were almost as clear as my glasses).

17

Well I am incredibly short-sighted. If I take my glasses off, I can’t read the heading ‘The Straight Dope’ on my computer screen. :eek:
What’s happening is a gentle improvement, so I still use my glasses for everything but reading (when I hold the book up to my face).

18

Happened with both of my parents. They’d both worn glasses for decades and one after the other realized they didn’t need them anymore. That lasted for another couple of decades, until they started needing reading glasses. Now they’re both stereotypical “have you seen my glasses? Hon, fetch me my glasses” old people.

19

Over ice with some vodka is always good. Or rum. Both are tasty.

:smiley:

20

If you’ve never worn glasses before, be very careful going down stairs, unless you want to fall down stairs.

After a year or two of bifocals, I told my doc I couldn’t see the computer screen clearly. “You mean about this far away?” he said, “That’s too far for bifocals. You need trifocals. For really close stuff, like tying fish hooks, just take off your glasses. You are near-sighted, you know.” I don’t mind all that, as long as I can see.