When I last saw my optometrist, 1 year ago, he was upset with me because I still didn’t need bifocals at 47. He asked if I had memorized the charts. He will be happy when my insurance starts up in October and I can go see him again. I am pretty sure the presbyopia has finally started to kick in. (Well, it started to kick in a few years ago, but the myopia was so bad, the only affect was to improve my vision. I can see clearly almost 8 inches without my glasses now. Well, clearly except for the astigmatism anyway. 
)
Mazeltov!
Now you won’t have to stand 4.1 feet away from the mirror to see to trim the hair out of your ears and nose. 
missred (who got her first pair of trifocals this year…now get off my lawn!)
Eh, I busted my leg very badly when I was 27, and it took a LOT of surgery and physical therapy to fix it (I was on crutches for the better part of a year). Finally I got sick of not being able to get myself a glass of water unless I used the walker with the basket on the front, and decided that I was ready for a cane, dammit.
So the minute I walked in the door from physical therapy with my shiny new cane, the phone rang. It was a telemarketer. Trying to sell me pre-need funeral planning.
I got my first pair of varifocals some years ago.
Varifocals are, imo, the greatest optical invention since that light idea. Except - and this is important - when walking downstairs in the Netherlands.
Aw man, I thought you had a real bad issue to share with us like, dry dreams and wet farts.
Got my first set of invisible-type bifocals at about 48-50, give or take. I hated 'em. The focus point constantly changed when I moved my head up and down, and I was constantly bobbing around, trying to find the miniscule sweet spot for whatever it was I was looking at. After going back to the optometrist twice to complain about them, he ordered a set of regular bifocals with the big D-shaped lens in the bottom, and I haven’t complained a bit. These are MUCH better than those other things!
Of course, they didn’t work well for computer work, so now I have another pair of glasses that live on my desk at work. The focus is perfect for something that’s just about an arms-length away - like a computer screen, or paperwork.
Oakminster, I now have an image of you going into court, face painted, loins girt with the pelt of a large wolf, sword in hand, and shield slung on your back. “Good morning, your Honor. My client intends to prove that the defendant is a weak, simpering pansy of a villager who has no honor and not a single manly bone in his body. We further allege that his claim that my client stormed ashore, raped, pillaged, set fire to huts, carried off young women, and behaved like a wild heathen from the north is false, scurrilous, defamatory, and will never happen again if he pays danegeld like he promised last time.”
Well, I am known to be a little eccentric, so I might get away with face paint and a sword, but if I show up wearing fur in August, they’ll know I’ve lost my damn mind.
When the docs told me my knee would hurt as lonmg as I lived, I didn’t mind. When they told me I had to carry nitro the rest of my life, it was no biggie. But that bifocal thing crushed me. You have my sympathies.
I’ve had bifocals since I was 20. Before that, I wore my reading glasses on a string around my neck - *that *made me feel prematurely old.
Progressive lenses. Not just for liberals, but for people who don’t want the line.
I had my first pair of bifocals when I was 7.
And I thought maybe Oak had taken his bar mitzvah or something, from the thread title.
I was expecting a rubber glove to be involved.
I’m still young.
I once read an AARP publication that said you enter middle-age at fifty. And I’m only forty-eight. So I can cling to the illusion of youth for fourteen more months.
My eyes have deteriorated as well. I think they’re almost down to 20/20 now. 
But the hair’s almost all grey or all gone.
My body responds to exercise by demanding rest as opposed to hitting the fat stores for energy.
I can’t tell if my hearing is going or if I just care less and less what’s being said around me.
On Monday I’m getting my first evaluation for a degenerative joint (shoulder)
I’m already sick of my little red sports car.
I thought you were going to say you needed Viagra and then I saw bifocals. I just started needing reading glasses last year. I tried the contacts and they made everything blurry so I use a cheap pair of reading glasses. My distance vision is still good. 47 to 50 is when the eyes start to go.
Man, you guys took the “can I just do it till I need glasses” advice and ran with it…
Just got my first progressives 9 days ago. Love them. Turned 40 this year, 2 days after a car accident that should have killed me.
As an “eye care professional”, I can tell you that there is only one way to beat the need for bifocals (or readers). Die before the need happens.
I decided to live long enough to need them.
The bifocals are not in yet. Apparently, there’s another truck scheduled to arrive this afternoon, and they may be on it.
The sunglasses are in. Same prescription, just not bifocal. Initial impression: Holy Shit!
It appears the world is in much sharper focus than I thought. Trees are not armorphous green blobs. They have millions of individual leaves! Apparently every other driver on the road had not somehow altered their license plates so as to render them unreadable from several car lengths away.
I once was blind, but now I see…
LOL that is how I felt when I got my first pair of glasses in the 5th grade. I could see! I am fine with my bifocals w/o the line. Took a minute to get the hang of it now it’s great. I used to snicker at the old farts who could not read small print. Then, dammit, I one day I could not read the words on the back of an aspirin bottle. Now I just hand it to a young 30 year old to read for me.
I remember the time my optician persuaded me to buy bifocals. I never learned how to use them as I always take my glasses off when I read anyway.