I got glasses for the first time when I was around 11 or 12. I didn’t really think that my vision was bad - until I put them on, and not only could I see better in general, I could see in 3D for the first time ever. That was freaky.
(My right eye was so much worse then my left that I didn’t use it at all.)
Yeah. I had to send away to get high index plastics for my glasses from the same place that did the Hubble telescope corrective glass. Or so the shop I went to told me. Probably just as well or I’d fall over on my face all the time from the weight. 
Last time I got contacts, my right eye was -11, left was -9 or so.
Without my glasses, well. checks out in hall I can just about tell there IS a bulletin board less than 10 feet from me (festooned in various colored papers).
I’d love to have eye surgery, but these are the only two eyes I got which makes me very nervous about the risks. I suspect furthermore that I fall outside the upper end of the accepted range of blindness for being a candidate. 
Ditto. My third correction, for some unexplained reason, eliminated the halos. I have, and I quote, “lovely thick corneas” which would allow one more correction. I’ll pass for now.
I wear fab light little glasses (different pairs) when I’m out of my cubicle and when I read. I’m good with that. I can find my way around my house without glasses. There isn’t dent in my nose from the weight of the frames. I can put on mascara without smearing the mirror because it’s so close. I can find the stairs and the bathroom without glasses. I can tell if it’s the mailman in her little beige car, or my husband in his big green truck pulling into the driveway. I couldn’t before.
I too had Lasik before they’d refined the data, so now I would not be eligible. I’m very glad I got it early, but YMMV.
:eek: Wait, all you see is the “E” and you don’t wear your glasses except for a couple of activities? How do you get by? All I can see is the “E” (I have around 20/200 vision), and without my glasses, I feel blind as a bat.
So is there a reason why the top letter on eye charts is always an E?
It’s not always E, but often is.
And as I mentioned above, some charts have 5 letters at the top, not 1. 
It’s a confidence builder for those of us who are extremely myopic. 
And there are eye charts with only Es (facing different directions) like this one here:
http://www.independentliving.com/prodinfo.asp?number=657834
as well as eye charts with pictures. We used those while doing eye exams at the Special Olympics.
One of my maternal grandmother’s stories was about how she got her first pair of glasses at age eight or nine. Up to that point, her father had said something like, “No daughter of mine has bad eyesight.” After getting her glasses from the optometrist, she said, “Daddy, buildings have corners.”
Her daughters all inherited crap eyesight with serious astigmatism. Plastic lenses meant that my mom and aunts could finally wear glasses all day; the glass lenses they needed were so terribly heavy that they had to take breaks every few hours even with nice thick nose cushions. Thankfully, my sisters avoided the astigmatism from my mom and I avoided the color blindness from my dad, so all three of us have normal eyesight. Reading this thread makes me very thankful for that lucky throw of the genetic dice.
BTW, the eye tests they usually use in Japan are the Landolt C (took me some googling to find what it was called) though I’ve only seen ones with exclusively 90º rotations — up, down, left, or right — instead of the 45º that Wiki says are usually used. I kind of prefer this format since it’s impossible to memorize or fake like the letters, and the circle with a break is slightly more difficult to distinguish than the orientation of an E, so if you can’t see it, it’s pretty clear that you can’t see it.
I’ve had dry eyes since forever, it worried my Lasik doc somewhat and affected my ability to wear contacts. Being told to carry artificial tears with me and learning to use them as needed was sort of a side benefit of Lasik in my case :smack: (you know, as in “ok, why didn’t anybody tell me about these fifteen years ago? I thought eye drops were only for when you had an infection!”)
My mother started having to take off her glasses to read in her early 60s; she’s now 67 and considering her first pair of bifocals as it will probably be easier to deal with than switching glasses all the time; her mother started wearing reading glasses in her 70s, her father in his 80s (and reads the newspaper without them); my grandfather on the other side died at 65 without having time to need reading glasses and the grandmother started on reading glasses in her late 60s. So I went into Lasik knowing that I had about 25 glasses-free years. It’s definitely something to take into consideration.
My great-aunt (in her early 80s at the time) was one of the first Lasik’ed people in Spain; she got it for free, on Doctor’s orders, and it took her from “not knowing there’s a car there if it’s dark grey, unless it revs up” to being able to recognize people on the street. So I don’t know how high the limit is, but quite astronomic.
My eyes aren’t nearly that bad, but when I had a contact lens slip out of place (I wear the RGP kind for astigmatism/bifocal reasons), I bumped into the door frame a few weeks ago. That was kind of humbling.
Also, I wore my glasses yesterday. A friend tried them on (who was wearing contacts at the time), took them off immediately and said, “Woah, there…instant headache!”
Oh, waaaah! I want the eyesight I had back in grade school!