'Bred Crumbs

Focus Grope

I officially became Old today. The life sentence of my agedness was handed down in one word: presbyopia.

After years of slightly improving vision – still horribly nearsighted, but improving – I have suddenly and unexpectedly hit the Time of Needing Reading Glasses (Or Some Variant Thereof). I didn't realize it, hadn't been feeling like I was having trouble reading, but better-one-better-two doesn't lie. My eyes can no longer completely focus near as well as far, even when corrected. And it's downhill from here.

Bifocal contacts are still too imperfect to apply to my myopia, but science has cooked up another way I can avoid glasses. It's called monovision, which somehow doesn't have a ™ after it. One of my eyes now gets a contact stronger than my previous prescription, and one eye a weaker one. Supposedly, my brain will shortly learn to handle distant focusing with one eye and very close objects with the other. But the more I think about this, the less sense it makes. It seems like the result would be slightly blurry vision at every distance, which is pretty much what I'm experiencing. (The distance to the computer monitor especially seems to fall into the zone of mixed focus.)

But it's been only five hours, and these things take time. For all I know, I'll wake up tomorrow a multifocusing machine.

I'm also trying a switch from two-week contacts to daily disposables. Another curious trick of vision seems to come into play here. When I'm in the doctor's office, the daily contacts are only a little more expensive than my old ones, especially when you consider that I won't need solutions anymore. But when I go out to the reception area, the contacts suddenly cost a few hundred dollars more a year. Then when I go back into the doctor's office to express my doubts about switching, the extra cost is again described as slight. I guess my brain will adjust to this discrepancy as well.

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