Yeninko of the Umlaut

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Bad Eyes! Bad!

As some of you may know I had LASIK eye surgery performed about five years ago. Previous to that, I had worn glasses or contact lenses for a decade. My eyesight was so bad that, as I’m sure you have heard before, I couldn’t find my glasses if some one moved them from one end of the table to the other. I would just be unable to see them and would paw around till I found them. I don’t know where it rated in the 20/20 scale but in contact prescription lingo it was -5.75 which is pretty bad.

After LASIK I had 20/15 which is slightly better than ‘perfect’ vision.

A while back when renewing my DMV card I noticed that my left eye could just barely pase the test. Apparently 20/40 is what you need to do so. So I went to the eye doctor and had my eyes checked. Of course the results were in contact notation*, right eye -1.00 left eye -0.50, enough to notice, and therefore annoy. I thought that maybe I should pick up some disposable contacts for those nights at the opera or on the occasional long drives.

Today I went in to be fitted for contact lenses and it turns out that contacts aren’t a good choice for me any longer. Due to the LASIK surgery the ‘roundness’ of my cornea is now less round then it normally is. Normal eyeballs are in a range of 4.1 to 4.4 somethings (which I will henceforth refer to has eyesballroundnesses’). Post LASIK most peoples eyeballroundnesses is are between 3.8 and 3.4. Since contact lens manufactures are concerned with the majority of the population and not a tiny fraction of it (me), they don’t make disposable for eyes like mine (and yours if you’ve had LASIK done).

I can use non-disposable soft or hard contacts but seeing how I don’t plan on using them often and they wouldn’t fit as comfortably it seems that those would be suboptimal solutions. Glasses would probably be the best bet. So after five years of perfect vision I need to get glasses. I could get LASIK done again (and indeed the place where I had it done in Montreal has a lifetime warrantee) but I think I’m going to wait on that and make sure my eyesight stabilizes. Ones cornea has only so much tissue that can be removed (usually two procedures is all you get before you run out of corneal tissue).

Now I blame all of this strictly on computer usage. Perfect eyesight plus five years of a minimum of 8 hours of screen reading a day gets me here. It probably doesn’t help that I read so much either. In any case this is just more of an impetus to work at a job that doesn’t require staring at a screen all day. Just another reason to pursue teaching.

Any one wanna come pick out some glasses with me?



* If anyone knows what either notation is called and/or knows of a conversion chart, let me know.

2 Comments:

  • "Look Ma, no eyes!"

    "Bad eyes, bad!"

    See what happens when you don't keep an eye on your eyes?

    By Blogger Stanza, at 7:39 AM  

  • As you know, I spend more time trying to ruin my eyesight than anyone, and I also refuse to wear any kkind of assistance. While lasik may have been a good idea the first time when your eyeballs were way out of whack, I suggst you consider it to be the eyeball version of liposuction. Your degrading vision is a symptom of flabby distance muscles, and all you need to do is some eyeball excercises to get your vision back. Mine comes and goes a bit, but I never let myself get lazy enough to let it get bad. I have some easy eyeball excercises if you are interested:

    Get out more. You are spending too much timne on closeup. Overstrengthening that muscle makes it harder on the other.

    Look at the very edge of your peripheral vision and while keeping it as focused as you can, trace the whole edge of your vision. Feel the burn.

    One eye at a time, focus on a close object (like your finger) and then focus on a far object right behind it. Repeat quickly. My mom has a problem with her vision being weak but perfectly balanced. She can focus on anything, but it takes her several seconds.

    There is a buddhist method that uses a picture of something like a snowflake. You position yourself so the points are at the edge of your vision and slowly trace around the entire edge of the the flake.

    If you need a burst of clear vision for something in the mean time, try taking a deep breath, tensing all your muscles for a few seconds, and then releasing both. This should trick the involuntary stronger muscles in your eyes into relaxing a bit.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 9:57 AM  

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