The Saga of The Lenses Part 2

Sorry for the peace and quiet on my blog the past couple of days. As most of you know I spent the past two weeks in the Netherlands, celebrating my birthday with family, but also making some must needed trips to hospital, dentist and optician. Anywho, I arrived back in London two days ago, and am slowly getting back into the daily rhythm of work.

The main change for me is I’ve got to switch to hard contact lenses (I’ve been using soft contact lenses for 10 years now) and it’s proving quite a challenge. Remember my blog post during Christmas where I went to the optician and found out my eyes had declined even more, and that I had to go to the hospital first before I could get any new lenses? Well, I went to the hospital, they checked my eyes and everything is fine. My eyes have declined quite a bit, but that happens more often and they can’t see anything weird going on.

So I went back to the optician where they had a new lens specialist who measured my eyes again. She explained to me that my astigmatism is now so high that soft lenses might not work properly anymore. Astigmatism is caused by the curvature of your eye; the higher the astigmatism the more irregular your eye. When the astigmatism becomes to high, what can happen with soft lenses is that when they dry out or when you blink, the lenses warp and the wearer can’t focus properly. Hard lenses don’t warp, so they don’t have that problem.

I’ve gotten test sets for both soft lenses and hard lenses, and I already notice the difference. I just can’t see properly through the soft ones anymore, while with the hard ones everything is so much sharper and precise. But my eyes need time to adapt to them; each time I put them in my eyes tear up terribly and there’s nothing I can do about that. It takes about 2-4 weeks to fully adapt your eyes, and I’m now on day 7. All I can do is keep wearing them and hoping my eyes adjust to them as quick as possible.

I’ve always wanted to switch to hard lenses, but was always too busy, and didn’t want to spend time getting used to them. Now I have no choice in the matter and I’ve got to make time to adapt my eyes to them. It’s annoying and time consuming, but in the end I know it will turn out better. The great thing about hard lenses is that they last way longer than soft ones (like at least 2 years) and they only cost €230 (in comparison to 4 times €160 in 2 years). So fingers crossed that my eyes will adapt quickly.