I am now one week into my Orthokeratology adventure.
This adventure involves putting in hard contacts each night at bedtime and taking them out first thing in the morning. Then, the eye retains the shape from overnight, so I'm not wearing any sort of contacts or glasses during the day.
It's been a fascinating week.
First, I've never worn hard contacts, only soft, so that has been a learning experience, getting them in, taking them out, and just having them in at all.
Second, I started to wear glasses when I was around 16 and starting to drive. Over the years I've held steady with a low prescription, but I need them for generally walking around and driving, movies, classes, etc, anything that requires distance vision.
Later I switched to daily contacts and alternated with glasses, then weeklies, then in DE I changed to the 'keep them in 14 days/nights', but would swap back to glasses then for a few days.
So at this point I've amost had some type of eye correction for almost half of my life, every single day. This is the first time I've been able to walk/drive around without anything in/on my eyes and it's vaguely unnerving as I've forgotten what that's like.
In case you're curious about the details:
-I am nearsighted, albeit mildly so. I have moved slowly through glasses/contacts until my most recent prescription of -2.25.
-I have astigmatism
Costs:
-Not sure what this will run you in various countries. In the UK I got set up for 200 GBP from my eye guy for all eye photos, office visits and the initial set of contacts plus solution etc. In theory, assuming I do not manage to lose, mangle, etc. the contacts, they should last for about 10 years he suggests, before I might need reading glasses or some other change to the eye landscape requiring a new purchase.
I would normally pay around 200 GBP+/year on a new pair of glasses + disposable contacts. (Yeah, I'm not so frugal on this point.) So changing to this method should be a more frugal option in the long-run, assuming I do it for more than one year.
Pros:
My vision at the end of today (working for 8 hours in front of a pc, and then walking an hour to reach the eye office) was better than 20/20, 10 hours after taking out the hard contacts.
Cons:
The right eye (with the stronger astigmatism) is correcting a little more slowly than the left so at the end of the day it's a tiny bit weaker. This may correct out in another week or two, or it may require a different nightly contact to sort it out.
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4 comments:
Wow, that sounds amazing. That was an option I had never heard of, when I had Lasik 11 years ago. Is it new, or Europe based, or perhaps my severe astigmatism and near-sightedness did not make it an option?
Did you need to fall into a certain range to do it?
And do the hard lenses hurt and is there any issue of oxygen starvation to the eye? When I was young, my aunt had hard lenses (long time ago) and there were issues with the non-permeability and it was very dangerous to sleep with them in.
Read the article- fascinating. I'll be interested to follow you through this process.
Aren't the hard lenses uncomfortable when you're sleeping?
Let us know how it works. I can recommend Lasik. I had it done 3 years ago to fabulous results and my insurance paid for more than half of it as long as I signed away my rights to glasses.
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