Because I'm Not Limited By My Eyesight

... or so I'd like to think. If only that were true.

In all actuality, it's horrible. I've been in contacts since I was ten. I had glasses for a few years before that. I have not had a day in fifteen years where I could wake up and see clearly.

My prescription is a -9.00/-8.00 in my right and left eye, respectively. This means that I put my hand about six inches from my face and I can't make out the lines of my palm. It means that I can lay in bed next to Steve and only see the shadows of his face. I wouldn't know if he was making faces at me or if his eyes were open, for that matter. It means I can only stumble around without the aid of my glasses or contacts and it certainly means that I can't leave the house without something on or in my eyes.

Contacts are a wonderful invention. Except when you wear them for close to fifteen hours a day every day for fiteen years of your life. Apparently, my eyes don't take too kindly to the lenses anymore. There's a point where they're overtired and stressed from relying on foreign objects to allow me to see straight for so long.

I reached a point a couple years ago where my eye doctor literally told me I could go blind if I continued wearing my lenses as often as I did. I found out later, after freaking the hell out, from a gentler doctor that he was exaggerating greatly but that possibility was still there. Apparently, contacts block the oxygen flow to your eyes and causes swelling in the cornea. This swelling allows room for blood vessels, which aren't supposed to be in the white part of the eye, to grow. Overtime, these blood vessels can actually grow into the iris (the colored part) and, in severe cases, over the pupil, causing deteriorated vision.

Sound like I know what I'm talking about right? Well, it's because it's all I've heard about the past couple of years. I was put into the type of contacts that I throw away every day because they're supposed to allow the oxygen to flow better. I was just recently put back into the every two weeks kind. And for the longest time, my eyes were doing great. Now, the redness has come back and I walk around looking like I have a severe case of pink eye.

That wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have to go out into public. Especially in a new place. I had the people at my old job trained. They knew what it was so they just let me know they were red and went on about their business. Here, I have to constantly reassure people. It's not pink eye. There's no goop. There's no itching. It will not get your kid sick. It doesn't hurt. Most of the time, I don't even notice it until you point it out or I look in the mirror.

It doesn't REALLY hurt. It can be a bit uncomfortable because the corneal neovascularization makes the eyes dry, so I'm putting drops in them all the time. Sometimes it feels like I have an eyelash stuck in my eye all day.

The problem is that I know how to fix it, but it's not that easy. I have glasses. I've been wearing them pretty steadily the past week. But the moment things start to get better, I'm back into my lenses. I could wear my glasses at night. I could wear them on the weekends. I could wear them all the time. But I don't.

And I'm not being stubborn. I would love to wear my glasses comfortable and have my eyes feel wonderful and not have to deal with the redness or the dryness or the discomfort. But it's not that easy. Because my prescription is so bad, my lenses are rather thick. I even had a thinning agent put on them and they're still thick. They're cute glasses, and they could be thicker but they're not thin by any means. Coke bottles, bug eyes - call me what you will, I've heard it all before. I can't wear any eye makeup at this point either because it irritates my eyes and I'm constantly putting drops in them anyway, so it becomes a bit redundant.

That's all self-conscious surface stuff. I can get over that quickly, particularly if it makes my eyes feel better. What I have a problem with is the actual transition from the contacts to the glasses. If you think I'm a klutz without glasses, you should see what I'm like with them. I run into shit. I fall over things. I completely lose any dept perception or peripheral vision. The other night I ran smack into the doorjam because I couldn't judge the distance between myself and the actual door opening.

The glasses don't move with my eyeballs. I can have my contacts in and I can look left or right without turning my head and I can see clearly. With the glasses, they don't move. They're planted on the front of my face, straight ahead and anything to either side of me is blurry unless I turn my head. So I see nothing but shapes and shadows to my side and it's unnerving. I get extremely disoriented and nervous.

Maybe I wouldn't have so much trouble if I hadn't been in lenses for so long. I came to terms long ago with not being able to wake up in the morning and actually see my alarm clock. But the contact lenses afforded my some sort of normal vision and I embraced that, possibly too much. I did abuse them but that's because they made me as close to normal as I could be. Not being able to see clearly is scary at times and frustrating and can make you feel absolutely helpless. And contacts fixed that.

Being in glasses makes me feel not so helpless but will never be as good as contacts. Aside from all the disorientation, they make my eyes so tired. I only really see clearly dead straight ahead. Even to the side of the lenses is distorted because of the curvature needed for the thickness. And because my script is different in both eyes, it's more exaggerated with glasses. So I'm fighting all day to focus and just see clearly and it's literally exhausting. My eyes practically feel swollen shut by the end of the day. Some eye drops, a hot compress and an hour or so on the couch and I'm feeling better, but again, something frustrating because it cuts into my time that I could be living a normal seeing life.

I don't know what I'm going to do. I haven't had a good vision plan since I got off my dad's insurance and that's because my parents were paying for a PPO. I don't even think I have that option with my new company. I'm on an HMO which does crap for your vision. At my last company, I had vision coverage but not enough to take good care of my eyes. I got one free eye exam and $35 towards the purchase of contact lenses or glasses every two years. At this company, I don't even have that.

Part of the reason I went off the type of lenses that you throw away every day is because they were so fucking expensive. I was paying forty dollars a month, which came out to be close to five hundred dollars a year flat out of pocket. I did it for as long as I could and only went back to the extended wear when my doctor okayed it. Apparently, the okay needs to be reniged because they obviously aren't working.

I could've just skipped the contacts and put the $35 towards glasses, right? Wrong. Because of the polymer that has to be put on my lenses to make them thinner, my glasses can cost over two hundred bucks. And it's not just a cosmetic thing - the prescription is so bad that the lenses pretty much need the polymer to fit into any decent set of frames. And there was a point where my prescription was changing every six months or so, which doesn't bode well when you pay that much for glasses and six months later, you can't see so well out of them.

The eye exams themselves weren't that big of a deal. Once I started having all the problems, they were being billed as medical, instead of vision, so they were covered under my insurance. And from what my last eye doctor told me, I can have them covered under medical for the rest of my life because apparently I have a freckle on my eye. Who knows what exactly this means but it's not such a big deal, as he said, so I'm going to roll with it.

The final option is probably going to be Lasik surgery. But again, we go back to insurance, which doesn't cover it, or enough of it to make a significant impact. As of now, insurance companies still consider it cosmetic. And that kind of pisses me off. Because yes, it cosmetic for people who use it to correct slight eye problems. For people who can wake up and read the numbers on their alarm clock. I could even see it being cosmetic for people with scripts as bad as me but no eye problems except they just don't want to wear contacts anymore.

But I'm running out of options here. And that surgery is expensive. Plus, it's not one hundred percent guaranteed and I've heard of side effects such as extended dryness and auras and having a hard time driving at night.

Which leads me to the entire point of this post: they should have medical exceptions for people like me to get the Lasik surgery. Like people who get approved for gastric bypass surgery because the quality of their life has been threatened and their health is in serious danger. My overall health may not be in danger but my eyesight certainly is. And sometimes, I wish that was taken more seriously. I'm a fairly healthy person, except for my eyesight and sometimes, I wish all that money I paid for insurance and all the crap I put up with actually served a purpose and could improve the health of my eyes.

I've just never felt like people (and I mainly mean insurance companies) have taken my eyes problems seriously. And that's partly my fault because I didn't take it as seriously as I should. And looking back on it, I wish I would have. No one told me the lenses could affect me like this and now it's too late. It was pretty much too late when they told me. And now, it's just like, well, it's only contacts and eyeglasses.

No, it's not. It's my vision. It's my livelihood. It's how I conduct my life.

And there's got to be a better solution out there.

At some point, I'm just going to have to suck it up, get the surgery and finance another bill. At least that would be worth the interest I was paying on it, unlike all the other crap I've financed.

Now if only I could get through the next little while with my glasses. If you see some poor girl wandering the streets of Charleston, bumping into telephone poles and falling down stairs, kindly take me by the hand and lead me home.