Eyes and Aging
Aging is a funny thing. It happens so gradually that you don't feel much difference as the days, months, or even years pass. Then, suddenly, an abrupt reminder of your advancing years appears. Reading glasses, for example.
Last week I went to the optometrist for a checkup, as I dutifully do every two years. Nothing serious, everything checked out. She increased my contact lens prescription ever-so-slightly, from -1.50 to -1.75. No big deal, right? Not so right. Because seeing at a distance and close-up are a balance, adjusting one impacts the other. An increased distance prescription means close-up objects like a book or a laptop are suddenly much more blurry. Oh dear.
The solution? Reading glasses. Yes, there are other solutions like fancy multi-focal contacts, or less fancily, having a stronger and weaker prescription in each eye. But these are compromises: what you see at a distance and close up are not crystal-clear. Maybe I'm just a vision perfectionist, but I want everything I see, at any distance, to be in super high definition.
Reading glasses over contacts are the only real way to get that. Other than laser eye surgery, which would correct the distance. For some reason having lasers shot into my eyes doesn't totally appeal to me. Maybe one day. In the meantime, reading glasses it is.
Back to aging. All of a sudden I'm one of those people constantly putting glasses on and off. And grasping around for said glasses, sometimes not finding them anywhere. This is different. Inconvenient. Annoying. What older people do. I'm one of them now. Gradually and then all at once.
But I want to see! So, no choice. Except lasers.