Myopia
On losing a bet with God
I have an eye doctor appointment later this morning, and a little time to kill before that, so let’s talk about being blind as a bat.
OK, it’s not that bad, but my uncorrected vision is awful1, and has been for decades. When I was a post-doc I got something in my eye that scratched a cornea, which was painful enough that I basically couldn’t sleep, so I went to the medical center at Yale. The med student who came in to do the initial check-up asked me to take off my glasses and read the eye chart with my uninjured eye, and I had to tell him “With my glasses off, the only reason I can tell you the top line is an ‘E’ is that I saw it when I came in.”
A lot of people don’t realize how bad my eyesight is because I wear contact lenses nearly all the time, since about ninth grade when I got sick of having my glasses smashed into my nose while playing basketball. For most of that time, I wore rigid gas-permeable lenses, because I have some significant astigmatism as well, and those do a better job correcting that. Several years back I lost a lens and needed a replacement in a hurry, and the only doctor I could see on short notice couldn’t handle hard contacts, so I switched to the soft lenses. Apparently the astigmatism is on the border of what can be left uncorrected: my vision with the soft lenses is definitely a bit worse, particularly when driving at night (all the streetlights and headlights are little crosses), but it’s tolerable. They’re a lot better from a comfort standpoint, though. I don’t have to worry anywhere near as much about getting dust in my eyes as I used to with the hard lenses.
My mother also had terrible eyesight, but had LASIK surgery twenty-odd years ago, and raves about it. I’ve never been able to work up enough enthusiasm for the idea, certainly not enough to overcome my deep antipathy for medical settings.
And that’s kind of an amazing thing, because I’m living with a condition that a few hundred years ago would’ve been profoundly debilitating— I can’t see anything clearly if it’s more than 6-8 inches from the end of my nose. But modern technology has both made a permanent fix for the condition available and made the basic situation tolerable enough that I’m like “Enh, it’d be a hassle. Pass.”
I’m old enough now, though, that I’m starting to wrap around to the other end of bad eyesight. My contacts and glasses are configured for distance vision, but thanks to the aging process, I now have trouble focusing on anything closer than 6-8 inches from the end of my nose. If I’m going to be in a place where I need to work on something close up, I need reading glasses, so I’m amassing quite the collection of cheaters from the racks in grocery stores and pharmacies— basically buying a pair for every place I might conceivably need one and not have it2. I’ve got one for each of my desks (home and work), one on the nightstand, one in the car, one each for the jackets I wear regularly…
If I’m not wearing my contacts, I now (ironically) find it easier to read without my glasses than with them. Particularly with a phone or backlit e-reader; it’s a little tricky with paper books, because it’s hard to get adequate light on the page when I’m holding the book eight inches from my face. My last couple of eye appointments, they’ve tried to sell me on progressive lenses, but that seems like a recipe for at least a few weeks of low-level disorientation, which isn’t really worth it just to make it slightly easier to read in bed3.
Of course, the grocery-store reading glasses tend to have a certain Clark Kent aesthetic, which comes back around to one of the reasons I wear contacts all the time. It’s one of my few areas of vanity— to quote The Pip, “You dress like you have no money”— but I don’t like the way I look in glasses, mostly because the prescription is so extreme4.
Which brings us around to the subtitle I used for this post. That’s from my sophomore year when the rugby team went on a Spring Break trip to the Bahamas and I lost a contact lens down the sink. I was lamenting the need to wear my dorky Coke-bottle glasses around, which was going to do a number on my already limited ability to pick up women in bars.
One of the seniors on the team, who wore glasses off the field5, said “Just take them off and squint a little. That’s what I do.” I handed him my glasses, he looked through them, and exclaimed “Holy shit! What, did your parents lose a bet with God?”
It’s a little weird to find myself again being the Guy With Glasses, wearing cheaters so I can see well enough to play word games on my phone in restaurants and waiting rooms. Given the get-what-you-pay-for fragility of the grocery-store cheaters, I might need to invest in some higher-quality reading glasses, since the level of magnification I need for reading isn’t enough to massively distort my face, so the aesthetic isn’t as bad. That would raise the stakes of forgetting or losing those, though, and as a result it’s probably not worth the hassle.
Interesting optics note: I tried to do a version of the side-by-side image at the top while in my office on campus, but it didn’t work as well with my phone camera. Locking the focus through my glasses and then taking the lens away did produce some blurring, it was nowhere near as bad as the reality. I’m not sure what’s going on there; probably some funky tricks relating to whatever they do to get a clear image out of a cm-scale optics package.
A pretty light post, but it’s been a shitty week, and writing something insubstantial but fun is a much-needed morale boost. Here’s a button if you like this:
And if you know what’s up with the phone camera thing, or just want to share your own stories of impaired-but-correctable bad vision, the comments will be open:
Also, this blog passed 1000 total subscribers in the past week, which is both largely meaningless and pretty cool. Many thanks to all of you who read my nonsense on the regular.
Prescription around -8 diopters.
I still get caught out occasionally, particularly in the summer when I’m not wearing a jacket. In a pinch, I can take a photo of a menu or a credit-card slip with my phone and zoom in to read the text.
If it comes to it, I have a pair of glasses from a couple of prescription updates back that work just fine as reading glasses.
I asked once about prescription sunglasses, and the woman at the mall store looked up the prescription and said “Um, no. We can’t do that.”
Hey to Matt “Engine” Conlan ‘91.
It wasn't until my vision started to go in middle age that I realized how much I had leaned on the ability to take off my glasses an look close up at very small things that most people needed a magnifier for.
I wore contacts until my forties, when I needed progressive glasses. I did that until last year, when I needed cataract surgery. The new artificial lens that were put in were designed to correct distance vision and my astigmatism, but I still needed reading glasses. That was a complete flip-flop for me. I had been able to read without classes at all due to my near-sightedness. I now have five pair of grocery store ones and I got one pair for the computer that is weaker. The I use my computer I am far enough away that my reading glasses are too strong.