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entering the bifocal phase
Monday, December 16 2013
I took delivery of my first pair of progressive-lens bifocals today. I'd bought them on EyeBuyDirect.com and designed them by combining the transcribed (but barely-legible) prescription from my occasional optometrist with a reading-lens power determined by trying different glasses at a drugstore. (I'd chosen the weakest power: 1.25, in whatever units that is. Oh right, diopters!) Despite the fact that both lenses in the new glasses distort light in about the lowest ways possible, I quickly found them somewhat disorienting to wear. My eyes weren't used to the presence of different focus powers in different parts of their trackable range and were especially displeased with the visual distortions that happened when objects were viewed through different parts of the lens simultaneously. I found the bottom part of the lens (the part designed for looking at nearby objects) to occupy too much of the visual range it seemed to cause real problems when looking at visually-low objects tha happened to be far away (such as the steps going down a stairway). Before getting them, I hadn't realized how much of the adjustment to wearing them would be unconsciously learning to move my head (not just my eyes) when tracking things at various depths in my visual field. In the long term, what will probably happen is that my head will unconsciously know to move up and down to allow my eyes to focus on whatever I happen to be looking at through the proper part of the lens. That will help spare the muscles within my eyes the increasingly difficult task of flexing my increasingly rock-like internal lenses. In the meantime, at times today I felt like the glasses might be giving me a mild headache.
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