eyes

So I have contacts now! Or... again. I'm nearsighted by roughly four diopters in each eye; I've needed vision correction since pre-adolescence. At first I went for glasses, but in high school I tried rigid gas permeable contact lenses and stuck with them for several years. I had no problem inserting or removing them, but the nightly cleaning process, my enjoyment of impromptu naps, and the extreme discomfort whenever some little particle got into my eye gradually led me back to the ease of eyeglasses.

Over the years various disadvantages of eyeglasses arose: when my friends went snorkeling spur-of-the-moment in Hanauma Bay, I had to stay behind. In public bathhouses my glasses were completely obscured by condensation, and without them I had a hard time reading signs or clocks or recognizing people I'd come with. In chadō, the lack of peripheral vision led me to bend my neck to see things that would be below the lower edge of my eyeglasses if I kept my neck straight and properly in line with my back. More trivially, a pretty metal filigree masquerade mask I picked up on Etsy looks ridiculous with eyeglasses. More abstractly, eyeglasses, especially sunglasses but also regular eyeglasses, seem like an interpersonal barrier in photos or when I'm talking with people face-to-face.

So I decided to try modern soft lenses, with a little hesitation because I knew their larger size and lack of rigidity makes them harder to insert and remove. (For reference, rigid lenses are inserted by placing them directly on the cornea, and they're removed by pulling the eyelid tight and then blinking.) And I couldn't forget that my decades-ago first attempt to put lenses in my eyes led to a vasovagal response. Wikipedia and the technician teaching me describe this as the process for soft lens insertion:

Soft lenses may be placed on the sclera (the white part of the eye) and slid into place. The other hand may be used to keep the eye open. Alternatively, the user may close their eye and then look towards their nose, sliding the lens into place over the cornea.

I had a lot of trouble with this technique. After forty minutes of practice, I managed to get a lens in each eye, but I couldn't get them out, which involves squeezing the edges of the lens together against the eye. I called it a day and returned the following week to try again with what turned out to be a different technician, who demonstrated a far simpler insertion technique: just put the lens directly on the cornea. The end. Just like with rigid lenses. I mastered that pretty much instantly. Placing it on the sclera and then sliding it into place on the cornea just doesn't make sense to me. With practice I eventually mastered lens removal, too. They're very comfortable so far. I haven't gotten anything bothersome in my eye in the week I've been wearing them—I don't know whether that's because I just haven't gotten any significant particles in my eye in that time or whether it's because it's much less irritating with soft lenses than with hard ones. I still have to clean them nightly, which is slightly easier due to the all-in-one solution but slightly harder due to the tint being so faint that the lens is essentially invisible when it's in the solution. For the record, they're daily wear disposable lenses designed for 4-week replacement.