Contacts are OK - glasses are a thousand times better.
This is a tale of my wife’s love/hate affair with contacts.
At primary school, Lynne didn’t know anything was wrong with her eyesight until she was having increasing difficulty reading the blackboard, and then she was transferred into the front row - the place where all the “difficult” pupils sat. A visit to the school nurse confirmed she was short sighted, and she was given a note to take home instructing her parents to take her to an optician for glasses. She was only to wear them in class, but she found that she also needed them for watching TV at home. They were National Health Service beige plastic frames, which I always thought were the height of cuteness on girls. She had other ideas and hated wearing them, but it was a necessity for her. At home, she would go out with her pals, but never took part in any ball games or go on bikes as she just couldn’t see well enough, and she point blank refused to wear her glasses outside.
She left school and got an office job, and she’s often told me the story of how she always carried her glasses in her bag, but would never wear them. She was forced to put them on at the bus stop so she could see the numbers on the buses coming, but once on the bus she would take them off. Then at work, she didn’t need them as it was all mostly close office work. At 18, her sight had got worse, but still she wouldn’t wear her glasses unless it was absolutely necessary. She told me how she would go out to clubs and dances bare-eyed with her best friend holding onto her, and if boys came up to chat to her she couldn’t even see what they looked like until they were right up in front of her face. She knew things were getting worse day by day, and was in total denial about her sight. The next time she went to the optician she was 19, and she was given the news she dreaded. Her myopia had progressed to the extent that she was told she would have to wear her glasses full-time. She told me that the first thing that went through her head was that it was the end of her world! She thought, “How are boys ever going to look twice at me now? A girl with glasses? Yugh!” If only she knew then!
She chose a fashionable black plastic cat’s eyes frame, and started her life as a full-time glasses wearer. She wasn’t amused. She was so upset over it all that her mother said she would buy her contact lenses for her 21st birthday. This cheered her up, and she got a pair of hard lenses which were very expensive at the time, and the only type available. She had to attend the optician’s every day after work for a week to practice puting them in and taking them out. She took to them like a duck to water. Her life opened up again.
Then I met her and we married. After a good few years, she was aware of continual irritation from her lenses, and some days she would grudginly wear her glasses to get some comfort. Normally, she wore her contacts from the time she got up to the time she went to bed. Then one morning she put her lenses in and felt a searing pain in her left eye. It was so bad that she couldn’t wear the lens, and she was crying with the pain. I took her in an emergency to the optician’s and they examined her eye. Then the optician told her she had a scarred cornea and asked how she did it. Of course, she had no idea. Then he asked to see her lenses she had brought with her, and immediately spotted that the left one was fractured on its edge. Mystery solved. But worse was to come.
He gave her a full examination, and discovered that due to oxygen starvation because of too much lens wearing, the blood vessels in her eyes had started to rise to the surface and some were much too prominent. The immediate verdict was no more contact lenses. Glasses full-time from now on. At that time, gas permeable lenses were just in their infancy. I was delighted with this news, as not only did I now have a full-time GWG, I didn’t have to worry about her going blind. She was given medicated drops to apply daily for a week and told to come back then. Also, a new pair of glasses were chosen, and then the journey began of increasing prescriptions every few years - well into her thirties. I started counting the increasing power rings and was in heaven! Now she is a proud full-time glasses wearer.
Lynne’s third pair of full-time glasses
https://vision-and-spex.com/contacts-are-ok-glasses-are-a-thousand-times-bette-t575.html