Thursday, May 21, 2009

The one eyed man is king

or in my case two separate one eyed men. Another unintended consequence of the cataract operation and opting for the myopia correction. As previously blogged I cannot use glasses alone to correct my vision as the prescriptions in the two eyes are too dissimilar.

Varifocal hard contact lenses was an option but I am still too squeamish about eyes. Mary has worn hard lenses for twenty plus years. I may be too old a dog and watching her trying to retrieve them when they go wandering off into the corner of her eye is more than I can bear to watch let alone contemplate doing it in my own eyes.

Instead, at the optician's suggestion, I am trialling a weird solution using soft daily disposable lenses: long distance in my dominant right eye and reading strength in my left. He assures me that the brain automatically adjusts and uses the relevant image. This is mostly true but feels a bit weird. I can always see both near and far but there is always an out of focus component from the other eye. I feel oddly spacey most of the time but (I hope) that will pass.

I did notice the mono-vision at the cinema the other night watching the excellent Star Trek. You try watching an entire movie with one eye half closed and that will give you a feel for what it is like.

Other side effects are simply those of switching from glasses to lenses such as I do not steam up when I open the door of the oven or dishwasher. Also I miss not being able to take off my glasses to do really close fiddly work.

Another side effect is that my stereo vision may not be as good for judging distances. Safe for normal everyday use - I have not bumped onto anything yet - but not much point in going to the IMAX to see a film in 3D then :-(

1 comment:

Rosa said...

Hope you settle in with your new eye concoction. I'll never forget getting contact lenses for the first time in over 10 years and felt something was oddly strange about them. Finally figured out that at that exact point, it was time to begin wearing bifocals! Damn. So I know what you mean about the focusing of one eye at a time part. Oy.