Are you one of us? When you’re caught outside in a romantic April shower, and the grass and the trees are drinking it in happily, do you say unkind words about the rain as you wipe your glasses on your shirt? When you happen upon snow falling ever so softly to the ground, do you lower your head and ram your way out of the gay frolicking people who are building snowmen and sledding downhill? As you walk through a cold, clear, starlit winter night, does every breath you exhale leave a lovely fog on your spectacle lens? On a sunny bright summer day. but you get the idea. I’ll spare you from more poetic detail.
If you long to enjoy the elements, dress for a party, read books, and so on, without your glasses getting in the way, sliding off your nose, or getting misplaced and lost, then contact lens might be the answer for you.
I know nothing about hard contact lens, but I should think most people can wear soft disposable contact lens. These are flexible, thin lens that will not feel alien in your eyes. There are all sorts of soft lens - you can even wear them if you need bifocal lens or have astigmatism. They come in all sorts of varieties, daily disposables, two week disposables, and monthly disposables. They come in colors if you like those. They seem affordable to me, but they’ll set you back more than your faithful average pair of glasses. I don’t know if they are relatively more expensive in India, as I’ve never had to buy some there.
I was first fitted with contacts when I lost my last pair of glasses(still missing - if you find a large dorky pair of glasses with scratches on the lens and loose screws, and can get me to admit they are mine, there’s two dollars in it for you). I had to drive to the optician’s wearing my prescription sunglasses. Things were looking dark(they usually do when you wear sunglasses at 6 PM on a cloudy day). But then the optician popped the lens into my eyes with ease, and it seemed like a miracle that I was able to see clearly right away!
Don’t let me mislead you - putting in contact lens isn’t a piece of cake in the beginning. The first day by myself, I tried every way in the brochure the doctor gave me, to insert lens into my eyes. No matter what, my eye was downright unhappy when it saw this finger with a foreign object on it approaching. There was no way it was going to stay open. I did finally trick it into looking another way when I put the contact lens in - this works like a charm. I take about half a minute to put both lens in now. Taking them out is even easier. So, expect a few delays in the first few weeks, while you learn what’s the best way for you. The important thing is that they feel comfortable once they are in. If after a few days of wearing contacts, you still feel the contacts uncomfortably in your eyes, or worse, if your eyes are dry or hurt and water, you should make sure you’re doing everything right. You might need eye-lubricating drops. Always have a pair of eye-glasses as well, so that you can wear them on the days when your eyes feel irritated, or when there is conjunctivitis going around(more on that later).
Your contacts will need some loving care - but not much more than glasses. If you are taking your lens off at night, you’ll need to clean them and let them soak in a bath of contact lens solution every night(daily disposables are an exception).
Let’s come to the more disagreeable part about contacts - are they safe? Nobody ever talks about this - atleast nobody did to me anyway. I had to do a little digging into the’Acuvue’ website to find that there is greater risk of eye infections with contact lens than without. This risk is even greater if you wear your contact lens through the night. Another downside which I didn’t know about till it happened to me - a contact lens can get lost behind your eyelid, especially if you are a novice. Nobody ever tells you about it! I found nothing on the official sites of contact lens makers. Google saved me when I typed’Contact Lens Lost in Eye - Help!’ Apparently that is a common occurrence, so people have a solution to this problem. Just read up on it before it happens to you, and rest assured that your lost lens cannot make it’s way to your brain, it’s just lurking behind your eyelid, and can be manoeuvred out quite easily. Thirdly, I have a lurking fear that wearing those lens, however thin, might not be so good for the eyes in the long term. I’m almost in denial, for I’ve never Googled(uncharacteristically for me, for I love to find the negatives) about the cons of’con’tact lens. My advice is, if the lens in your eyes don’t feel right to you, then go back to the non-intrusive glasses. Atleast you can be sure they’re not scratching your delicate eye lens.
Still, I wear them. They allow me to face rain and snow with more pleasure(or atleast with less crankiness). They make it nicer to kiss babies and other kissable ones. It feels liberating to not have my glasses making a dent on my nose. At times I almost forget it’s something artificial in my eyes that’s helping me see.
’I can see clearly now the pain is gone’(The pain of wearing glasses, that is).