I got hard contact lenses yesterday.

Image from here.

Let me take a moment here to explain to you that I have chosen to try out hard contact lenses (or gas permeable lenses, as they are commonly known to those of us in the optometrist field {I consider myself an old pro now, with how many times I’ve had eye exams in the past month}) as a last-ditch effort before having to wear glasses full time. The kind of soft contacts I wear (incidentally, the only kind thick enough to actually correct my outrageously poor vision) were denying my eyeballs of any and all necessary oxygen, and so, in order to save themselves from suffocation, they started growing blood vessels into my corneas so more oxygen could get in there.  Which was nice of my blood vessels and all, except for the fact that they got a little power hungry and are now one step away from taking over my vision as a whole, leaving me with clouded over, permanent, irreparably damaged vision…

…Let’s just say, I can never wear soft contacts again.

What’s more is that the blood vessels in my eyes leave me at very high risk for Lasik surgery—one wrong move, and POP! goes the blood vessel, which, I guess, is bad.

So now that you understand why I am putting myself through this misery (I just really don’t want to be doomed to glasses for the rest of my life), you should understand why I am so dedicated to making this work.

I really want to be happy with my new contacts, but goodness gracious, are they ever irritating to my poor little eighty year-old eyes. Every time I put them in, I get this surge of Hulk-like anxiety because the itching is so intense. It feels like I’m blinking down on sandpaper, and all I want to do is take the contacts out and throw them on the floor and smash them under my big toe and never wear them again. A few times I have come THIS close to clawing my eyeballs out altogether—in the heat of the moment, ANYTHING, blindness, even, seems favourable to this kind of pain.

When I first put them in and my eyes were watering and blinking uncontrollably, the optometrist gave me a little pep talk. He was all, “You know, gas perms (gas perms—he even has a nickname for the little buggers) are almost totally obscure now in North America. They’re really a dying art. I mean, in Japan, 90% of all contact wearers wear gas perms, and in Europe, it’s 50%. But here in North America? Not even CLOSE. People here are so reliant on instant gratification, you know? They don’t have the diligence to work hard, to fight through the pain, even if it is the best choice for their eyes.”

I blinked at him furiously, like I was sending a message in Morse code with my eyelids, and nodded my head in agreement. I can totally do this, I thought.

Before he went on his rant, I was ready to throw my hands up and quit the whole business (I am a quitter, after all), but as soon as he said the Japanese do it all the time, I was like, wait, HOLD UP. Ninety PERCENT? Well, if ninety percent of the most brilliant race on earth can happily wear gas permeable contact lenses, surely I can, too.

True, they all probably have senseis guiding them down the path to enlightenment or eternal balance or self-actualisation, but I have my optometrist. And I have my blog readers. The one sure-fire way to make me do something is to tell me about all the people who’ve successfully done it all their lives—if they can do it, by george, so WILL I.  I am going to make these dadgummed contacts feel like dadgummed roses in my dadgummed scratchy eyeballs—roses in the proverbial sense, of course. Real roses, thorns and all, would probably feel worse than the lenses themselves.

But you guys?  Not much worse.

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