Adventures in Ophthalmology

[truepenny]

Mille remerciements to whoever it was who pointed out, after the last time I went to the ophthalmologist, that if I told the doctor my eyes were staying dilated twice as long as they ought to, there might be something to be done about it.

(That's a terrible sentence.)

I did tell the ophthalmologist, and they only put one kind of drops into my eyes, instead of both. ("You dilate very well," the technician said admiringly.) I only looked like I'd been taken over by The X-Files's oil-slick aliens for a couple of hours, and by the time matociquala and I got back home, I could actually focus on things again. Well, at least well enough to read Peanuts collections, which was about all I was good for. But the difference in the quality of the experience was profound. Thank you!

And I'm getting bifocals. Which, yes, I'm rather young for, but the combination of myopia and nystagmus does exciting things like that. The ophthalmologist gave me the choice--I could either get bifocals, or just continue taking off my glasses when I want to look at things close up--but my vanity and self-image are not really implicated in my glasses (I started wearing glasses at the age of three, so I've done the But they make me look like a geek! thing. Besides, I am a geek. Truth in advertising, baby.) and there's something so counter-intuitive to me about having to take my glasses off to see what I'm doing that I'd really rather get the bifocals and not worry about it. It'll actually kind of be a relief.

I'm very grateful to be living in the twenty-first century.

Comments

[porcinea.livejournal.com]

I got bifocals, too! Just this past January. So cool. Now I can stop taking my glasses off to knit.

[graygirl.livejournal.com]

I love my glasses and look naked without them.

[pameladean]

I have not your young experience (first glasses at age 6), but I love my bifocals. My only complaint is that I keep trying to look at the night sky through the wrong part of them. Mmmph.

P.

[lisajulie.livejournal.com]

I succumbed to bifocals about eight years after my optometrist felt I should. (His quote? "You've been stalling for eight years. Suck it down."). I sucked it down.

My optometrists gave me several valuable hints. First off, when descending stairs, incline your whole head. Just looking down corrects your vision to close-in, and the stairs get both fuzzy and scary. Also, when driving, when you look in the rear view mirror, tilt your head towards your shoulder. This ensures that your distance correction is being used when you look in the rear view mirror. Important stuff.

I have whopping amounts of myopia and it takes equally whopping amounts of eye-dilation stuff to make my eyes succumb. The last time I had them dilated, I used the fact that I couldn't focus for beans, and had jonsinger teach me how to center clay on a potter's wheel. I _had_ to use my sense of feel, there wasn't any visual input worth taking. One interesting effect of the eye-dilation stuff was that as it wore off, the edges of things got pixellated. Also, one eye undilates more quickly than the other. This leads to the visual equivalent of motion sickness.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Aieeeee! You win on the Bad Dilation Experience Sweeps.

And thank you for the tips about bifocals.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Mine are varifocals, which seems to mean that they are bifocal but invisibly so, and may affect the relevance of my experience. But - people gave me all the advice about how it would be weeks before I could walk downstairs in them, and it just wasn't so. The day after I got them I was walking in the North York Moors, and going down hills with as much confidence as ever (which isn't that much, but that's another story). And not having to remove / switch glasses all the time is such a plus!