Contacts!

Welcome to my mini-rant about the trials and tribulations of wearing contact lenses.

See, I got them in the first place because trying to put my glasses on inside my helmet bent the arms of the specs and caused all sorts of deformities (to the specs). And when your specs are so bent that they won't sit straight, and you're looking over the top of one lens and through the wrong bit of the other one... not to mention the fact that whatever peripheral vision you have left whilst inside a helmet can't employ the bent-out-of-shape specs and is somewhat myopic - it's not safe. Add a bit of low, early morning or late afternoon sun.... recipe for disaster on a motorcycle!

So I faced that awful sickmaking feeling - the lifelong OH NO I CAN'T POSSIBLY TOUCH MY EYEBALL, I'LL VOMIT feeling - and had to actually touch my eyeball to put something on it (and even worse, sweep at it with a two-fingered pincer motion to take something OFF it again - aaaaargh!) and I got contact lenses. And I didn't vomit! Amazing!

Oh they are brilliant. Fantastic. Sublime. But they are such hard work!

Suppose you have a long-haired cat.

Oscar Bin Laden seems to generate an inordinate amount of invisible cat-fluff, which has some kind of fatal attraction for the inside surface of my contact lenses. Ouch.

And for goodness' sake, don't grow your nails (or get those fake ones). They can scratch the surface of an eyeball quicker than you can say "ophthalmologist".

A bit of a breeze on the eyeball - say, when you walk into somewhere nicely air-conditioned - will do weird things to you and make you do a 200 blink per minute thing that will make you look like an inept-but-desperate flirt. Something to do with drying out surfaces of eyeballs or something...

And this one - the weirdest thing that's ever happened to my eyeballs - one of the lenses somehow blew out when I stopped by the side of the road on the Hay Plain (i.e., in the middle of NOWHERE) and I had to find it on the road, somehow get it back into my eye (despite the wind) and ride about 100kms to the next town so I could wash the bloody thing.

Oh - and I discovered that ordinary tap water on a contact lens makes your eyeball blench - actually blench - it quivers uncontrollably and makes your vision a bit psychedelic. It feels seriously weird, and there's a horrible moment when you think your eyeball might pop.

There are lots of problems, but the daily one I face (quite apart from the ubiquitous invisible cat fluff) is this: being shortsighted, I need the contacts for distance vision when I ride. I spend most of my day in front of a computer at work, and can't see a bloody thing unless I get glasses to counteract the contact lens prescription! Grrrrr!

Eyeball sonnet (c) Sue Hines 2009 bwahahahaha!

Oh, for the eyeballs of my youth
The clarity, acuity and such
The simple way of seeing all the truth
The eyeballs that I never had to touch
The cat fluff that could never make me twitch
The simple act of seeing without specs
The focus near and far without a hitch
The joys of youthful eyeballs that would flex
The lack of fuzz and blur, with arms too short
The vision that still worked in crappy light
The twenty-twenty vision that I thought
Would last forever turns to shit at night
Oh blue-eyed Betty, doomed to just a blur
An eyeball-poking future life for her!