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how to have fun
Oct. 14th, 2007 12:29 am1. Wear rigid gas permeable contact lenses for approximately fifteen years.
2. Switch, on the advice of an optometrist, to two-week disposables.
3. Use these for a year, during about ten months of which the whites of your eyes are variously alarming degrees of red. This will be identified by no fewer than three medical professionals as an allergic issue, but several kinds of eye drops will make no better than moderate improvements.
4. Once you have scheduled your next eye exam, spend two weeks (approx.) not wearing contacts at all, using yet another kind of eye drops the while, finally getting your eyes back to something that looks to you like health.
5. Insist, at that eye exam, that you be switched to daily disposable contact lenses, on the theory that besides your well-documented allergies (which never gave you this kind of red-eye trouble in the old lenses), the two-week disposables accumulate enough buildup in two weeks to irritate the living crap out of your eyes, and cannot ever be really cleaned the way the gas perms could. This demand will be granted.
6. Discover that daily disposables, because they are much thinner (on the grounds that they need not be as durable), are a wretched pain in the ass to remove. Resign yourself to a learning-curve period, just as you had when you switched to soft lenses in the first place.
7. Become accustomed to trying a few times to get the lens out of your right eye, taking a break to switch to the left, getting the lens out of your left eye, going back to the right, hitting it with a few drops of saline solution, and finally getting the right lens out, dammit.
8. When you run out of the samples, spend another week in your glasses while you wait for the Costco to get in the order that contains the prescription for one of your eyes.
9. At the end of the first day that you have the new dailies out of the big box, successfully remove the lens from your right eye on only the second try! Well done!
10. Try to remove the lens from your left eye. Fail. Repeat x3. Add saline. Continue to fail. Realize that this hurts more than you remember. Look carefully in the mirror. Begin to understand that you can't see the outline of the lens around the iris of your eye. Conduct other extremely scientific experiments -- peering at the iris of your right eye, covering your right eye with your hand, putting your glasses on, etc. -- and form a strong suspicion that the contact lens is not in fact on your left eye, and so for at least several of the past few attempts you have been dragging your fingertip right across the conjunctiva and cornea. Wonder what could possibly have become of the contact lens. Rub your left eye. Realize that you can still feel something in your eye, which, combined with the fact that the thing is not on the counter, stuck to the side of the sink, on the floor, &c., convinces you that it is still in there somewhere. Look again at the irises of both eyes and confirm that, except for the redness and irritation in the left eye, they are similar in non-lens-covered-ness. Hold your eyelid open as far as you can and try to see if the lens has slid over into the outer corner. You will not see the lens there. Rub your left eye. Flood the hell out of your left eye with saline solution, blink a lot, and try again. Fail. Begin to wonder if the irritation is just from the fact that, as observed, you have been poking at your eyeball with your finger, and the lens is somewhere out of sight, and thus you can just go to bed. Worry some more about the fact that you have not, to your knowledge, actually removed the contact lens from your eye. Doubt that this constitutes any kind of real emergency, such as would necessitate a midnight call to a doctor of some kind; reflect that you actually have no idea how bad it would be if you had a disposable contact lens stuck up somewhere where you couldn't get it out on your own; begin working on a decision to go tomorrow morning to the optometrists and ask them to look in there with their magnifiers and try to find the lens, and assuming they do, take it the hell out. Rub at your eye some more.
11. Pull at the eyelid again and lean in to the mirror again. Up underneath the upper eyelid, near the outside corner, see a ridge that cannot be your eye.
12. Blink.
13. Know for sure that this is the contact lens, folded over on itself, and you cannot at the moment get to it because you need both hands to hold your eye open in this position.
14. Think about A Clockwork Orange.
15. Look up and to the left, and then forward, moving your eye slowly, several times, in order to catch the folded lens on the drying conjunctiva and drag it down away from the inside of the upper eyelid. When enough of it is exposed, grasp it very very carefully with your thumb and forefinger and then fling the fucker into the bin.
16. Blow your nose, blot away the tears streaming from your left eye, note the difference in color between the white of your right eye (white) and the white of your left (bright red), and reflect that if you don't get better at this in a big damn hurry, you can always eat the 75 bucks and get them to order you rigid gas perms, given that you can't remember the worst problems you had with those ever being as bad as this.
2. Switch, on the advice of an optometrist, to two-week disposables.
3. Use these for a year, during about ten months of which the whites of your eyes are variously alarming degrees of red. This will be identified by no fewer than three medical professionals as an allergic issue, but several kinds of eye drops will make no better than moderate improvements.
4. Once you have scheduled your next eye exam, spend two weeks (approx.) not wearing contacts at all, using yet another kind of eye drops the while, finally getting your eyes back to something that looks to you like health.
5. Insist, at that eye exam, that you be switched to daily disposable contact lenses, on the theory that besides your well-documented allergies (which never gave you this kind of red-eye trouble in the old lenses), the two-week disposables accumulate enough buildup in two weeks to irritate the living crap out of your eyes, and cannot ever be really cleaned the way the gas perms could. This demand will be granted.
6. Discover that daily disposables, because they are much thinner (on the grounds that they need not be as durable), are a wretched pain in the ass to remove. Resign yourself to a learning-curve period, just as you had when you switched to soft lenses in the first place.
7. Become accustomed to trying a few times to get the lens out of your right eye, taking a break to switch to the left, getting the lens out of your left eye, going back to the right, hitting it with a few drops of saline solution, and finally getting the right lens out, dammit.
8. When you run out of the samples, spend another week in your glasses while you wait for the Costco to get in the order that contains the prescription for one of your eyes.
9. At the end of the first day that you have the new dailies out of the big box, successfully remove the lens from your right eye on only the second try! Well done!
10. Try to remove the lens from your left eye. Fail. Repeat x3. Add saline. Continue to fail. Realize that this hurts more than you remember. Look carefully in the mirror. Begin to understand that you can't see the outline of the lens around the iris of your eye. Conduct other extremely scientific experiments -- peering at the iris of your right eye, covering your right eye with your hand, putting your glasses on, etc. -- and form a strong suspicion that the contact lens is not in fact on your left eye, and so for at least several of the past few attempts you have been dragging your fingertip right across the conjunctiva and cornea. Wonder what could possibly have become of the contact lens. Rub your left eye. Realize that you can still feel something in your eye, which, combined with the fact that the thing is not on the counter, stuck to the side of the sink, on the floor, &c., convinces you that it is still in there somewhere. Look again at the irises of both eyes and confirm that, except for the redness and irritation in the left eye, they are similar in non-lens-covered-ness. Hold your eyelid open as far as you can and try to see if the lens has slid over into the outer corner. You will not see the lens there. Rub your left eye. Flood the hell out of your left eye with saline solution, blink a lot, and try again. Fail. Begin to wonder if the irritation is just from the fact that, as observed, you have been poking at your eyeball with your finger, and the lens is somewhere out of sight, and thus you can just go to bed. Worry some more about the fact that you have not, to your knowledge, actually removed the contact lens from your eye. Doubt that this constitutes any kind of real emergency, such as would necessitate a midnight call to a doctor of some kind; reflect that you actually have no idea how bad it would be if you had a disposable contact lens stuck up somewhere where you couldn't get it out on your own; begin working on a decision to go tomorrow morning to the optometrists and ask them to look in there with their magnifiers and try to find the lens, and assuming they do, take it the hell out. Rub at your eye some more.
11. Pull at the eyelid again and lean in to the mirror again. Up underneath the upper eyelid, near the outside corner, see a ridge that cannot be your eye.
12. Blink.
13. Know for sure that this is the contact lens, folded over on itself, and you cannot at the moment get to it because you need both hands to hold your eye open in this position.
14. Think about A Clockwork Orange.
15. Look up and to the left, and then forward, moving your eye slowly, several times, in order to catch the folded lens on the drying conjunctiva and drag it down away from the inside of the upper eyelid. When enough of it is exposed, grasp it very very carefully with your thumb and forefinger and then fling the fucker into the bin.
16. Blow your nose, blot away the tears streaming from your left eye, note the difference in color between the white of your right eye (white) and the white of your left (bright red), and reflect that if you don't get better at this in a big damn hurry, you can always eat the 75 bucks and get them to order you rigid gas perms, given that you can't remember the worst problems you had with those ever being as bad as this.
