First day with contact lenses¶

Tags: personal, contactlenses, cycling

My pair of glasses was wearing out after some 8 years of service: just too much little scratches. Two weeks ago, a bigger scratch meant I really had to take some action.

I decided to switch to contact lenses. My reasons?

• Field of vision. No matter how big glasses are, they’re always in front of your eyes. Not at the sides. So if you look sideways, you don’t see that well. Which is sometimes irritating when, like me, you ride a recumbent bike and you cannot turn your back so much to look behind you.

• I have (for my medieval swordfighting lessons) a fencing mask. It does work with glasses on, but without glasses is obviously easier.

• Less money up front. Not the best of reasons, however. Over the long run, nothing beats a good pair of glasses that you keep for 8 years! No extra costs. With contact lenses, you pay regularly for cleaning fluid and new (monthly) lenses. But the monthly costs seem pretty reasonable (though I haven’t seen a final cost tabulation yet).

So off I went last week to bon art optiek in Nieuwegein for measuring my eyes (which had actually improved in the last years!) and arranging for new contact lenses. Good service and knowledgeable help! The current default choice in the Netherlands is to have monthly lenses, which seemed a reasonable choice to me.

Today, one week later, I went back to pick up my first set of month lenses, an instruction and some lens cleaner. Next week I must return for a check-up and possible adjustment (lens type, cleaning fluid type, strength). Today I got to fumble with those lenses to get them in and out of my eye, which I apparently managed to do reasonably quick. “Reasonably quick” for a man, I was told :-) (Woman have an advantage as they’re mostly already familiar with mucking around near their eyes with eyeliner and so.)

I now have them in for 3 hours. Time to take them out. 3 hours on the first day, 6 on the second and so on. My initial thoughts:

• I’m not inconvenienced by having them in my eye.

• I need to flick my eyelids more to keep my eyes moist enough.

• I need to adjust to viewing with contact lenses. The sight with individual eyes seems fine, but both eyes together need some brain adjustment. That’ll be fine in a few days I guess.

So: initial experience not bad at all.