My First Contact Lenses
It was the early 1980’s when I bought my first contact lenses. I have always had bad eyesight. In fact I did terrible in my first two years of school because nobody realized that I couldn’t see the blackboard. A child can’t tell a teacher they can’t see because they had nothing to compare. They think everybody see’s things this fuzzy.
When I finally got glasses it was not pleasant. Frames made out of hard plastic in the late 60s early 70s didn’t stand up too well for young boys and often I would wake up in the morning with them broken because I forgot to take them off the night before. Glasses did get much tougher with the new wire frames. I never broke too many of those.
But could they ever show how thick my glasses were. With thickness came the weight and those tiny nose pads. They could dig into your face so far you thought you might bleed.
Glasses didn’t change much in the 1970s but in the 1980s technology in plastic lens took a lot of weight off my poor old nose. The thickness was still there but they were half as heavy. There was a draw back to the early plastic they scratched very easly. In fact for a time I was keeping the frames and replacing the lenses once a year.
Then about 1983 I decided to try contacts. They were soft contacts and when I first put them on I was in awl of how big the world really was! It was huge! Clean too since my glasses were normally clean for an hour after I cleaned them then it was life through a haze again.
I drove home with them on. In those days you had break yourself in to wearing contact lenses. Mine were in for an hour and my eyes were burning. I couldn’t wait to get them out. Not an easy when you can’t keep your eyes open. Eventually I got up to 6 hours wearing them but couldn’t get past that.
After a while I found it was too much bother to stick those things in my eyes and wore them less and less until the day I tried to wear them for the last time.
It was maybe a week since I wore the contacts last and I wasn’t wearing my glasses when I went into the bathroom to put them on. I’m not sure if they still do this but I had two containers for my contacts. One you used for the cleaner and one for the rinse.
The first one I picked up was empty so I knew my lenses were in the other container. Of course I can see them well, I was just going by weight. I put the container with the lenses on the sink and proceeded to put the first lens in.
Well all of a sudden my eye was on fire. I had just rinsed the lens with the cleaning fliud. I did manage to get the thing out but not before hearing some object falling into the toilet while I was trying to pour water on my eye.
I still had the contact that burned me on my finger but yes, you guessed the other one was in the toilet bowl. It was then that I decided this was a sign, so I flicked the other one in and pulled the handle.
