Point To Point

Today has been a very interesting day: not least because I am staring at the blurry screen in front of me with bemusement. Let me explain; I have been a full-time wearer of glasses for over a year now, and I decided today that it was time to progress onto something that wasn’t such a hindrance in sports and similar athletic situations. So I went down to my local opticians in Boots this morning to test the waters with contact lenses, something which hadn’t appealed to me until one of my friends said he wore daily-disposables. So I went down today to have my eyes ‘measured’ and my prescription updated. After the normal happenings- big optical machine, lights being flashed in your eyes and reading letters off a wall chart- we went over the options. Lets see, there were the month lenses, the 2 week lenses and the daily disposables. At this point I made a compromise with my Mum; I would go for the daily disposables, but only order around 15 pairs a month. Despite this compromise its still very expensive, at £15 per month, or a pound per pair. So after working out my prescription I was given a tester pair and had them put in by the optician who was helping me.

Popping them out of their little saline filled containers, he said:

“I’m going to hold you eyelids apart: are you ready? Okay- Look up… look left… look at the corner… look at my tie.”

After a few go’s, he managed to get one in, although not without making my eye water really badly. The whole process was then repeated with the other eye, and then he examined them using the big optic machine again.

“Well, it appears the lenses are too big; I’ll have to take them out and re-fit you with some smaller ones.” he said as he walked out of the door. After a minute or two he returned, took the original ones out and then replaced them with the new, smaller, conveniently more expensive lenses. We finally deduced that these were alright, and I was taken to another ’specialist’ who would show me how to put the lenses in and take them out myself. This was actually really hard: for some reason I had an image in my mind that you could have them in your eyes as soon as they were out of the container, but you actually need to have some serious powers of persuasion to overcome the natural reflexes in your eye. Every time you try and touch your eye with the lens, it blinks, or attempts to, because something thats not meant to be there is touching it: putting in a contact lens involves pulling your eyelids back and holding them in place whilst manipulating a fragile lens on your finger. This then has to be placed on said eye, which is watering profusely, before blinking and looking up and down to make sure it is in properly. After a few failed attempts in the opticians I managed to put the lenses in and take them out successfully, and I was sent away with a few trial pairs to test out the whole process. The only problem is they didn’t have my prescription in stock, so I am wearing lenses that are too powerful for me.. I hope that explains the blurry screen!