Missives from the 6th Floor

For the first decade or so I wore Rigid Gas-Permeable or RGP lenses. I tried soft lenses once in High School, but got turned off because they were so easy to invert and hence more difficult to put on, and harder to care for. At the time disposable softs were a new thing, so soft lenses meant a whole mess of care and feeding that hard lenses didn't require. By that time I'd been wearing RGPs for several years, so the major upside to soft lenses - their immediate comfort - wasn't a big deal.

In my mid twenties my eyes changed shape - nearly over night - and lenses that had been a comfortable were suddenly not. My eye doctor confirmed that there was nothing wrong with my lenses - my eyes had changed - nothing to be done about it but get a new prescription.

He convinced me to give soft lenses another shot, and this time, I stuck with them.

A few years later, at a time when my career had me doing a fair bit of traveling, I had a rather nasty eye infection.

I was round-tripping to Boston pretty frequently, as well as visiting customers in the west half of the country, and generally spending a lot of time on planes.

My habit was to remove my lenses just before boarding, either putting on glasses or - just as often - just going to sleep at wheels up. Upon arriving I'd find a restroom to wash up and put my lenses back in.

One trip, I arrived late and decided to just wear my glasses 'till I got to my hotel. I noticed that my vision was a bit blurry - but attributed it to being tired. It turned out, after a week or so, my vision in my glasses hadn't improved, but I was seeing just fine with my lenses, so I went to the eye doctor to have my glasses prescription checked.

He had me remove my lenses, took a look in my eyes, and brushed the lenses - case and all - into the trash. He described the surface of my cornea as looking like the surface of the moon - pocked and pitted by infection. The reason I could see well in my lenses, it turns out, was that they were acting as a bandage - "filling" the pits in my cornea.

Over the course of about 6 weeks, a trip to a specialist, and increasingly nasty eye-drops, I got rid of the infection, and suffered no permanent vision loss (it wasn't a sure thing - the infection was pretty advanced by the time it was detected).

Ever since, I've been gun-shy of contacts. And the irony is that on that very trip, I stopped at a mall in New Hampshire and spent a relatively obscene amount of money on a pair of Oakley sunglasses, which I've barely worn since.

I only miss lenses occasionally, really.

Playing pool is tricky (it's hard to line up shots when you're looking over your glasses), riding the sport bike (same problem), snorkeling (not much of a problem, given how infrequently we do it), and occasionally glasses interfere with working on the cars or around the house - either getting your head into tight spots (generally a bad idea, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do) or hanging up-side-down to get the right angle on something.

I last had a contact exam just before moving to Washington - a bit over three years ago. 18 months ago I got the prescription - which wasn't perfect, but was better than nothing - renewed by an eye doctor whom I saw for an initial LASIK consult, but since we're heading out of town in a few days, and I plan to do a bit of snorkeling, it was time to get a real prescription.

So I made an appointment for last night with an eye doctor about a mile from the house, and spent today, and should spend the rest of a week, wearing the sample pair to evaluate the prescription. I go in for a follow up next week to check the prescription, and pick up another "sample pair" for the trip.

I've nearly forgotten what I look like without my glasses.

It's funny - after fighting so hard not to wear them as a kid, glasses are now firmly a part of my mental self-image.

Part of me thinks maybe I'll give them a go full-time for a while.

Maybe I'll even find that pair of sunglasses...