The Care and Keeping of Contacts

A recent survey unearthed the horrible truth (?) “that people have turned to beer, baby oil, Coke, petroleum jelly, lemonade, fruit juice, and butter as oh-so-wrong alternatives to contact lens solution.” What! The upside, though, is that people who clean their contact lenses with Coke and baby oil maybe deserve to be blind. (I hear Qream works in a pinch, though.) And the flip side is that sometimes people use contact solution as beer.

Unasked-for anecdote? Why not. (“It’s boring!”) Anyway, a couple years ago I realized one eye had gotten much blurrier than the other, so I went to the eye doctor to ask her to strengthen my contact prescription on that side.

The eye doctor took some fancy pictures of the inside of my eyelid, and pointed out all these white spots that were apparently [some horrible disorder, I don’t remember and had never heard of it], and told me that if I hadn’t come in right then, I would have come in the next week because I would have gone there en route to the emergency room, or something like that. Oh no, I thought, that IS fortunate. So she said I had to wear glasses and use some fancy eye antibiotic (eyentibiotic, wheee) for a week, and come back after that. It cost a bunch of money, but of course I bought it, because what do I know, and why would anyone gamble with their vision! So I did it, came back the next week, and she took more pictures of the inside of my eyelids. (Also, I never had any pain or redness or anything, so the whole thing was sort of surprising, but she’s the eye doctor.) It still wasn’t completely cleared up on the second visit, apparently, whatever this symptomless ailment was, so she gave me a different prescription for a different eye potion and the same come-back-in-a-week instructions. New eye potion, also expensive. Plus I was paying a hundred or so dollars for each visit to her office, so the whole thing was already costing upward of $500.

Third time around I was finally all cleared up, according to her and my latest round of eyelid photos (for which there was also a fee), and she gave me the stronger prescription for the lagging-behind eye that I had originally come asking about. So, that’s the end of the story, but what was up with that, you know?? Ayyy, that’s so crazy about those cookies!!