Contact Lenses

I was thinking about contact lenses today, since tomorrow I change this pair out for a new pair. I recently became able to wear 30-day disposable lenses, after years of having to special order lenses and wear them for a year, with monthly soaking in a special solution to ward off bacteria build-up...... These new lenses are pretty cool, although it does necessitate the wearing of inexpensive magnifying glasses when I read or do computer work. No biggie, however. It seems that my prescription has actually decreased a bit as I have gotten older.

It's been exactly 33 years since I started wearing lenses, getting my first pair in the summer of 1976, right after I graduated high school. I never wore the hard lenses, unlike my sister. Soft lenses were just out, and much easier to wear than hard lenses. I remember the first day I had the lenses, I went out and bought a pair of cool aviator style, reflective sunglasses! Those are still much the favorite pair I ever had, although they are long gone.

The lenses back in those days had to be 'boiled' every night. I received a round heater that had a lid with a basket on the top. I had to fill the heater with a certain amount of distilled water, then plug it in. It would boil the water, and the steam would cleanse the lenses (even though they were inside a case - I guess it really just heated up the saline solution inside the lens case to the point where it almost boiled. The downside was that this really had to be done overnight! I can recall forgetting to do it overnight, boiling them in the morning then trying to cool the lenses off by running the case under cold water! Nothing like buring your eyeballs..... I went through a couple of different sorts of heaters, before the early '80's when they came out with the various types of disinfecting solutions that required no heating. Pretty amazing now to look back on those days, when we thought the process was so high-tech!

I also became a sunglasses maven. I've always had several pairs of sunglasses since then, including some very nice - and expensive - Ray-Bans. I still have aviators and Wayfarers that I bought for quite a bit of money in the '80's. Classic styles. Nowadays I tend towards cheapo sunglasses, although I don't really misplace or break them. I currently have 4 pair, including a pair that I liberated from AJ.