I have worn contact lens successfully for 30+ years. I love contacts, hate glasses. For the past 10 years I’ve worn a particular brand of yearly replacement soft torics with the prescription adjusted for monovision. I am very happy with both my near and distance vision and the comfort level of my current lens.
But the manufacturer has discontinued that particular make/model and getting fitted with a comparable lens has become a frustrating ordeal. I’m six months into this, on my second optometrist, have tried at least a dozen type of lens and I’m still no closer to getting decent vision and comfort level.
In the past I’ve visited the eye doctor, when back to pick up the lens, maybe made one adjustment and that was that. I know I have exacting visual demands and my eyes are aging, though my prescription hasn’t changed. What is the problem this time?
Can anyone with more knowledge/experience in optometry give me some information and support? It would be much appreciated.
If your astigmatism has gotten worse, such that the cylinder power is higher than the spherical power, it can be very difficult to correct. I’m actually going through this right now with my optometrist because I have keratoconus, which gives me screwy shaped corneas. Oh, and if your prescription hasn’t changed, it may be that your eyes are less able to tolerate the contacts due to your age (happened to my dad - something about increased dry eye with age, so the contact is more likely to “stick” when it should rotate freely). But, IANAOpto/OPth so that’s more of a guess.
For Years I wore Acuview, then Acuview2
The last three times I have gone in for replacements they keep trying to push Acuview Oasis on me. I try the two week trial pair, something about it is wrong, so I say “no thanks, order me the Acuview 2”
This last time somehow I let them talk me into getting a year of The Oasis, and I finally think i figured out why they suck.
My left eye is slightly between standard contact sizes. Which leaves a bit of a edge to grab. In the older heavier AcuView and AcuView2, it didn’t matter the contact stayed where I put it. But with the Thin and whispy Oasis, the slight presure of my eyelid closing is enough to bump it a around a bit. The moving around is enough of a minor irritation to make my eye water, and eventually get the contact all gunky.
My doctor mentioned that I didn’t have a high degree of astigmatism and while my eyes have gotten dryer in the past several years, my current lens are still perfectly comfortable in most conditions. But then, this brand was promoted as a “dry eye lens.” My sympathies about the keratoconus, I understand that can be hell.
This may be part of my problem. My current lens are yearly replacement thus thicker and heavier than the bi-weekly or monthly replacement lens they want me to try. With those my vision keeps shifting and blurring and it drives me crazy after a few hours.
I wore them from about age 16 to about age 30. I also have astigmatism, and at about that time I started having problems. My lenses would slide off center, up under the eyelids, and they became uncomfortable even when that didn’t happen. I was told our eyes tend to get dryer from about 30 on; another factor in my case is probably that I began a new job in a notoriously smoggy area of L.A. I gave up and wore glasses until 2001 when I had my eyes lasered, and now have gone back to glasses for driving and such. But it’s a MUCH weaker prescription than I used to wear, and I can still dispense with the glasses when I need to. It’s nice to be able to leave them in the car when it’s drizzling and not deal with rain spattered lenses.
Astigmatics, are notoriously hard to fit with contacts for a few reasons, the foremost of which is that many astigmatics have corrections that need to lie on an odd angle for the contact to be in. Toric contacts fit best when the axis of the Rx is either near 90 or 180 degrees, this is because straight vertical or horizontal is the easiest orientation to maintain with current ballasting technologies. Even if your Rx was fine and dandy for many many years, if your cylinder correction changed to an oblique angle you will not achieve the same level of correction that you once had.
Also, astigmatics generally fare better with glasses because the corrections are stable. If you put an astigmatic in glasses for a long period and then try to resume contact wear, their acuity will not be as great and the loss of crispness will drive them batty until they become used to it and begin to perceive it as normal. Astigmatics also sometimes have acuity issues that cannot be fixed by conventional matters. If your particular flavor of aberration takes place in your eyeball and not on your cornea you will often perceive refractive error causing halos around lights, and ghosting of letters on high contrast materials. This cannot always be fixed. It sucks. Trust me, I know. I see halos around all high contrast lighting, and it drives me bananas.
You also mention that you have been wearing contacts for 30+ years and a monovision set up for at least 10 of those years. This leads me to guess that you are more than likely over 50 years of age. As we age our eyes get dryer and dryer. This leads to complications with contact lens wear. Comfort is often the least of your problems at this point. Part of how contact lenses work is that a tear film fills up the space between the contact and your cornea. That tear film creates an artificial lens, better focusing the picture you see. (This is highly simplified here). If you don’t have that tear film, the contacts can and do fog up as well as get smeared with the oils and mucus present in your eye. The tear film continually washes that goop away, making you able to see.
All this aside though, if you had a contact that worked that happened to be daily wear, my first instinct would be to put you in another daily wear model. Many providers are loathe to do this though because contact lens hygiene compliance sucks weasels and they are afraid you are going to damage your eyes and sue the pants off them. Your particular make and model of contact may have been discontinued, but many similar contacts could exist, and your particular flavor may be being manufactured under a different name/ brand of lens. Can I ask what kind of contact you wore before? I can take a look in my books and see if there is a comparable contact that perhaps you haven’t tried yet.
I did some checking and after talking with our doctors and calling Cooper Vision, the company that made your Tailor Made Torics, the closest contacts that they currently make are their Proclear Torics. These lenses are a monthly lens and are made in the same style and with the same materials as your old lenses. In fact, they really are your old lenses, just manufactured a little bit thinner to allow for more oxygen flow.
If you would