Pick 34 - Soft Lenses

I have worn glasses since I was 12 years old. Well, that’s not really correct. I started wearing contact lenses when soft contacts became affordable in the early 1980’s.  I still remember the first time I attempted to pop a contact into my eye. My wife had them before me and she made it look easy. Just place the lens on the tip of your finger. Bring your finger close enough to your eye to let the lens jump off your finger and attach to your eye. So after 25 years of spraying, wiping, scratching, misplacing and sometimes cussing my eyeglasses, I decided to give contact lenses a try.

For some twenty years my contact lenses served me well. Then I developed cataracts in both eyes. In earlier times this might have spelled the end of my contact lens days. All of the "older" people I knew who had the cataract surgery spent the rest of their sighted days wearing eyeglasses that resembled the bottoms of Coke bottles. Even if these glasses allowed them to avoid the "legally blind" stigma, they were still prohibited from driving or doing any jobs that required good vision. But it turned out that my cataract surgery had hidden value beyond my wildest dreams. When my eye surgeon removed my clouded natural lens, he implanted a newly developed artificial lens in the muscle tissue left from the natural lens. Within a day of the surgery I had 20/20 vision. With these new implants, I could see better than ever. The only drawback was that my brain could no longer control the severed muscles to focus for reading or close work. But a $5.00 pair of reading glasses was all I needed to remedy that. About a year later, my Optometrist found additional value hidden in those implant lenses. They were evenly matched for the best focal plane. This meant he could prescribe a single contact lens for one eye that converted it to a "reading eye"  and my brain would focus from the eye that gave the best results: left eye for reading, right eye for driving.  This was hidden value as far as the eye could see!

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