Real Life Problems: Super Prescription Glasses

Good morning!

I had thought to do a post this morning on some houses in a 1979 Architectural Digest bound volume I've been not-literally-but-almost-literally drooling over (at least salivating, let's say), when I decided this morning to write something instead on a subject that's been weighing h-e-a-v-i-l-y on me as the seasons change and pollen is anywhere and everywhere. Today is the first day in about a week and a half I've successfully popped contacts into my poor, rheumy little eyes, and I'm telling you, it's changing my life. In celebration, I pulled out this red patio dress I haven't worn yet (so many items in my closet fall under this category, this is from that flea market trip with Rae and Travis a couple months back), and took an outfit photo for the first time in weeks. Don't I look happy to be in glad rags instead of drab ones!

I hope you don't mind a rant today, because that's what's on my mind. Why wouldn't I don my crazy dresses, according to my custom, lo, these many autumn weeks? My glasses get in the way of everything! EVERYTHING. They have turned me into the mercurial thirteen year old I never was, stamping around half dressed in the morning in tights and slip like "I LOOK SO STUPID! I CAN'T FIND ANYTHING TO WEAR THAT DOESN'T LOOK STUPID!"  While I prefer to see, and know it's better to go around in spectacles than with eyes that are so bloodshot I look like I might have escaped from some government-funded secret laboratory in a horror movie, I have been so bummed out about having to wear glasses day, after day, after day. Number one: my prescription is so bad I have no peripheral vision. Every time someone comes up to the nonfiction desk asking for a stapler to my lefthand side, I have to whip around like a guest star in the old Batman tv series. Number two: My glasses are from SEE, and made of some fancy, compressed lenses that once smudged, remain smudged until you clean them with glasses-spray. I tend to inadvertently leave this at home and spend a good part of the day with my vision obscured by my own fingerprints. Number three: I just don't look like myself in goggles. I know you don't believe me, but it's true! The living proof:

I hate, HATE being four-eyed. Plenty of folks look undeniably cute in glasses (many of my fellow bloggers can rock a pair of prescription frames like it was nothing), but I don't think many people with as heavy a prescription as I wear can still look like themselves. Friends close to me have assured me that the glasses are "cute! No, you look fine in those!", but I seriously have had more than one person I didn't know from Adam approach me at the desk to say "Um, excuse me, I just wanted to let you know, you look about a million times better without your glasses. Just sayin'." I am not making this up. Specifically, two patrons in the course of a week, the first said that, the second said "Did you know you look far younger when you don't wear your hair pinned like that and without those glasses? Your glasses make you look much too old and stuffy." Thanks, bro. Now, while these library visitors need to go back to Miss Porter's to finish some courses on etiquette and not saying whatever damn thing comes to your mind every time you open your mouth, I also have to grudgingly agree with them! Please overlook the bags under my eyes from excessive sleep deprivation and compare these two mugs, side by side:

Having worn progressively worsening prescription lenses since the tender age of nine, I think I started around a -3.25 (normal, you should probably wear glasses near-sightedness) and now boast a present day -9.00 in each eye (Mr Magoo sympathizes with your debilitating lack of human vision). +10.00 is the equivalent of a magnifying glass, so imagine I have essentially two inverse magnifying glasses attached to my poor head. This makes my eyes, which balance out my large head and beak and are easily my best feature, reduce to the size of distant dimes behind the lenses. I am grateful that I have vision that can be corrected, it's not that I'm just miserably bemoaning my nearsightedness, BUT-- why can't I just wake up in the morning and go to work looking like myself? It would be like if, according to your allergies, you could either go to work in normal clothes, or have to wear a full length, shapeless, burlap caftan. "Hey Lisa, you look way better in dresses as opposed to this enormous feed sack." Ya think?! I'm afraid to get LASIK because, gee willickers, if my regular optometrist can't pinpoint a reason my eyes are habitually bloodshot and painfully red, what kind of things might he not know about how my weak little oculars would react to being surgered upon? I'm just saying.

Surely, we've made progress since the Victorian era in the science of eye diagnostics? (source)

I've been trying to just accept my fate as being sometimes in-glasses, sometimes out-- but I feel like, as opthamology must be a slightly more scientific field than say, phrenology or... I don't know, the kind of booths you see set up next to the ferris wheel where they can read your fortune out of a painted wagon, why can't my eye doctors prescribe some drop or at least a course of action to relieve my eye issues? I had a small retinal hole corrected in 2003, and iritis two or three times over the years, so it's not all hypochondria and vanity that sends me back to the eye doctor. I want to make sure my peepers are healthy! I've been something like five times in the last couple months, and while twice I did need a steroid drop to clear up inflammation, the other three times, our conversation went like this:

Me: So what's wrong with my eyes?
Doctor: Well, I've checked your retina, everything's fine in both eyes-- left eye looks a little more irritated that the right, but nothing to worry too much about.
Me: Why is there like a red ring around my iris?
Doctor: That's just the load-bearing part of the eye. When your eyes are overworked, they tend to get irritate around the iris.
Me: Is there anything I can do about that?
Doctor: Have you been sleeping in your contacts?
Me: No.
Doctor: Have you been wearing them longer than you usually do, say late into the night?
Me: No, I've been in my glasses for like two weeks, trying to give them a rest. And drinking lots of fluids, and trying to get plenty of sleep. They just won't clear up.
Doctor: Have you tried allergy drops?
Me: You told me last time those might be what's causing the irritation, so I stopped taking them. Doctor: Well, I would just um....let's see...we could put you on the steroid again? See if that clears it up?

As if he were asking ME what I'd like to do! Do you go to the doctor saying "I've been throwing up a lot lately" and your doctor's like, "Well, that could be anything from pregnancy to influenza. Do you feel pregnant?" I hate the subjectivity of it. What the heck do I know about my eyes?! Other than they're not normally this bad?! 

Glasses I've been considering...check out the first pair! 1,2,3

Anyway, lately I've been trying to decide if I'll just accept my fate as be-glassed, and if so, how outrageous a pair of frames can I get away with. Coastal had some cats' eyes I've been looking at, but it doesn't solve my problem of disappearing behind the prescriptive glass! Le sigh.

How about you? Are you blessed with 20/20 vision, or are you a fellow sufferer of Burgess-Meredith-in-the-Twilight-Zone-episode levels of myopia? Do you remember your first pair of glasses? Have you ever been frustrated with a health care professional's lack of, um, professionalism? How would rock a pair of coke-bottle lensed glasses, if you were forced to wear them? Let's talk! And please don't think I'm too bad for wringing my hands over a problem-that's-not-even-that-bad-of-a-problem-- it's been driving me crazy lately, and I had to get it off my chest.

That's all for today! I'm going to go enjoy my contact-lensed self away from this computer screen as best I can. Have a great Thursday, and I'll see you tomorrow for Photo Friday. Til then.