my stigmatism
It's almost Pi Day, which is when my mom passed away, and i am remembering my mom as i start to write this entry because she was the first person who taught me the word astigmatism. Because she had it. And i didn't. The context was a question about why her contact lenses had a line on the bottom and mine did not. Apparently people with astigmatism can't just jam in their contacts any-which-way, instead they have to make sure that one side goes on the top and the other goes on the bottom.
I didn't think about it much in the 20-odd years after that. I still don't really know what it is. I wore contacts most of my life, and aside from the first few years where my vision rapidly deteriorated, it stabilized around -5.0 in both eyes and that was that. When i was younger i always thought that when i earned enough money i would get corrective surgery, but by the time i actually earned enough money that i had the cash to casually afford it, i was well into my 30s and it didn't seem like such a big deal any more.
I don't remember exactly when my vision started getting worse, but i think it was around the time of COVID, when i left China and moved back to Canada for a while. For the first time in years, i could finally go to see medical professionals who spoke my native language again. That thrill was rapidly cut off when i never even got the chance to see a family doctor in person due to a combination of COVID and Canada's second worst social problem after unaffordable housing - a severe lack of family doctors. I did get the first fillings of my life, but i am still not sure whether i actually needed them or if the dentist was just fleecing me. But the eye doctor, well how could you fuck that one up?
Giving me an astigmatism diagnosis is how.
It's possible that previous optometrists had said as much beforehand but then i said not to bother because it wasn't severe enough. Certainly i remember continuing with the -5.0 contact lenses in both eyes despite having a worse prescription in one of the two because it's just easier to never have to worry which is right or left. Of all the medical professionals in the world, optometrists appear to be the ones who most prioritize patient comfort and convenience, which makes them A-OK in my books.
But over the past few years living in different countries i struggled to find the same brand of contacts that were comfortable before. I kept having problems with ticklish eyes and blurred vision. And then, back in a country where i could explain myself well, along came an eye doc with a novel suggestion. It's not the lens that's bothering you, it's the prescription! And thus i was enticed by the promise of newfangled astigmatism-correcting contact lenses that didn't come with a little mark on the bottom to make sure they were right way up, instead they were weighted and magically righted themselves after blinking once or twice. Everything will be so much clearer! Promise!
Well, perhaps things were clearer, for a while? Until they weren't. The itching and blurriness continued, as i faffed about attempting to ensure i always had the lenses right-way-up. And then the forest fires of doom struck western Canada, and with them came one of the worst levels of air pollution i have experienced in my life, and my eyes started to sting. My right eye more than the left, for reasons i still don't understand. I was gearing up to go on my big cross-continent bicycle tour, so i decided to get a good pair of glasses, just in case.
Those glasses were astigmatism-correcting too. And by gosh they felt very weird to wear. When i moved my head this way or that, it was like standing in a hall of mirrors. Look in one direction and the world would start to fold in on itself, look in the other and it was like a dolly zoom, the horizon yawning away from me in a disorienting fashion. But, never mind, they said. This is normal, they said. The trick to wearing astigmatism-correcting glasses is to not move your eyes around, but to move your whole head instead. It's normal! It's fine! You'll grow to love the clarity!
And then off i went, on my bike ride, gone for a year. No chance to go back and try something different. Along the way i trashed my contact lenses, because it turned out that glasses are in fact much more convenient for traveling. (If only i'd realized that decades beforehand!) Glasses might hide the shape of your face and make all your selfies ugly, but who gives a shit about appearance when you are cycling across Turtle Island? After 20 years of wearing Adidas superstars on my feet, kandi bracelets around my wrists and emergency hangover sunglasses permanently popped up on top of my head, my new image was a lean, mean, bandana-wrapped, sun-baked, bespectacled pirate with vaguely lesbionic Merrells. And a permanent squint.
Because these new glasses never quite worked out as good as they should have. By the time i got back from Colombia the frame was already disintegrating, probably due to the high temperatures and constant outdoor thrashing they had undergone in the previous year. The eye doc gave them a look and offered to do a full, free replacement under warranty. How could anyone say no to that?
I didn't say no to it, but when the new glasses came back, they never fit as good or showed the world as clearly as the old ones, even though allegedly they were exactly the same. But it takes weeks to order glasses in Canada, and by the time i got them in my hands i was heading right back out the door.
I made do for another 18 months, because that's my approach to life. Most of the time i just suffer minor inconveniences because i don't want to bother other people. I don't want to come across as entitled. I never return products. I'd prefer to trash the product and buy another one than be That Fucking Asshole that everybody working in retail and customer support hates. But even that i rarely do because i don't want to be wasteful. So most of the time i just deal with the jank. It's fine, you know? There's people starving in Africa, etc etc.
Well the past month or two i've found myself wheeling my chair to the front of the meeting room because i can't even read the massive fucking projector during meetings. I feel like i have gone near full-ass blind, it's ridiculous.
So this week i went in for an eye check and ordered new glasses. Taiwan is as efficient as China and can literally have your glasses and prescription ready in under 24 hours. I wore them Friday. I wore them Saturday. Today i went back and spent 3 fucking hours in there going back and forth with the optometrist trying to find out why - despite everything being much clearer - the new glasses were giving me a headache. Dear lord, 3 hours of me failing to find the words in Chinese for describing weird sensations inside my eyeball that i can barely describe in English was not fun. By the end of it i had a whole nother sort of headache.
I had to push back a lot on "well now you are seeing clearer it's going to strain your eye muscles more so you just need to get used to it", because i have heard that one before. I said, man, the issue is not the clarity. The issue is that one eye doesn't feel matched with the other one. I close my right eye, then the left, it takes 30 seconds for the right eye to refocus back on the thing i was looking at before. It feels like i got punched in the eyeball and no matter how many times i blink i still can't lose the haze. Am i blind? No, that was ableist hyperbole up there. Do i see better when they put that weird black eyepatch with the tiny hole in it over my lens? No. Do i need bifocals? Damnit, no. I just want to look out of my fucking glasses and not feel like the world is wobbling all over the place while my right eye zooms and unzooms like a bugged-out Borg implant.
They're going to try losing the astigmatism correction. I had the choice of -5.75 both eyes, which makes distant things somewhat blurry, or -6.0 both eyes which feels strenuous and slightly less blurry. Neither of them feel as clear as the -6.0/-5.5 with astigmatism correction that they gave me before, but also neither of them felt as wonky and "fake". I tried to explain i feel like i am walking around in a movie, like the world isn't real. It's not a pleasant feeling. I tried to explain that it felt like one eye was clear and the other was blurred, but then if i closed the clear one and just sat there for a minute or two then the blurred one got clear again, but then opening the previously-clear one left me with double vision. I tried to say "this is a fucking clusterfuck and it's driving me nuts", but i was probably driving them even more nuts.
God, i just hope that the plain old boring -6.0 lenses with no astigmatism correction will suck less. I picked the stronger prescription because i figure for close up work i can always fall back on my old glasses, since they're blurry at a distance but at least not completely useless at closer range.
Honestly, i am almost thinking of seeing if i could get corrective surgery again after this latest shit because it was so stressful. The worst part is i still don't know if the outcome will be any good. You don't know how much your eyes are going to hurt after wearing new glasses for a day or two until you actually wore them for a day or two. And i am already wracked with guilt and embarrassment for being That Fucking Asshole who went back to complain about something i bought. Perhaps i just have to accept that i will never see clearly again. This is it, isn't it? Yet another aspect of aging. Every other part of my body is disintegrating, why not the eyes too?
Fucking hell.
These are the things that - despite how desperately i want to throw away my job and just travel freely again - make me worry about my residence status, and my future. Sure i could go traveling now, bum around the world for a few more years, and it would be great. But someday i am going to be too decrepit to travel on a shoestring and too poor to travel in comfort and then i am going to be forced to settle down again. And at that point i might also be too old to work, so the settling down place better be warm and cheap and therefore not Canada or the UK. Getting a permanent residence in my back pocket now is insurance for later. But if i spend the next 5 years staring at a computer monitor, maybe that's the thing that's going to destroy my eyesight once and for all? Maybe i should go out and see the world now while i can still see?
Goddamnit.
Next weekend i am going dancing again. I hate this shit.
I didn't think about it much in the 20-odd years after that. I still don't really know what it is. I wore contacts most of my life, and aside from the first few years where my vision rapidly deteriorated, it stabilized around -5.0 in both eyes and that was that. When i was younger i always thought that when i earned enough money i would get corrective surgery, but by the time i actually earned enough money that i had the cash to casually afford it, i was well into my 30s and it didn't seem like such a big deal any more.
I don't remember exactly when my vision started getting worse, but i think it was around the time of COVID, when i left China and moved back to Canada for a while. For the first time in years, i could finally go to see medical professionals who spoke my native language again. That thrill was rapidly cut off when i never even got the chance to see a family doctor in person due to a combination of COVID and Canada's second worst social problem after unaffordable housing - a severe lack of family doctors. I did get the first fillings of my life, but i am still not sure whether i actually needed them or if the dentist was just fleecing me. But the eye doctor, well how could you fuck that one up?
Giving me an astigmatism diagnosis is how.
It's possible that previous optometrists had said as much beforehand but then i said not to bother because it wasn't severe enough. Certainly i remember continuing with the -5.0 contact lenses in both eyes despite having a worse prescription in one of the two because it's just easier to never have to worry which is right or left. Of all the medical professionals in the world, optometrists appear to be the ones who most prioritize patient comfort and convenience, which makes them A-OK in my books.
But over the past few years living in different countries i struggled to find the same brand of contacts that were comfortable before. I kept having problems with ticklish eyes and blurred vision. And then, back in a country where i could explain myself well, along came an eye doc with a novel suggestion. It's not the lens that's bothering you, it's the prescription! And thus i was enticed by the promise of newfangled astigmatism-correcting contact lenses that didn't come with a little mark on the bottom to make sure they were right way up, instead they were weighted and magically righted themselves after blinking once or twice. Everything will be so much clearer! Promise!
Well, perhaps things were clearer, for a while? Until they weren't. The itching and blurriness continued, as i faffed about attempting to ensure i always had the lenses right-way-up. And then the forest fires of doom struck western Canada, and with them came one of the worst levels of air pollution i have experienced in my life, and my eyes started to sting. My right eye more than the left, for reasons i still don't understand. I was gearing up to go on my big cross-continent bicycle tour, so i decided to get a good pair of glasses, just in case.
Those glasses were astigmatism-correcting too. And by gosh they felt very weird to wear. When i moved my head this way or that, it was like standing in a hall of mirrors. Look in one direction and the world would start to fold in on itself, look in the other and it was like a dolly zoom, the horizon yawning away from me in a disorienting fashion. But, never mind, they said. This is normal, they said. The trick to wearing astigmatism-correcting glasses is to not move your eyes around, but to move your whole head instead. It's normal! It's fine! You'll grow to love the clarity!
And then off i went, on my bike ride, gone for a year. No chance to go back and try something different. Along the way i trashed my contact lenses, because it turned out that glasses are in fact much more convenient for traveling. (If only i'd realized that decades beforehand!) Glasses might hide the shape of your face and make all your selfies ugly, but who gives a shit about appearance when you are cycling across Turtle Island? After 20 years of wearing Adidas superstars on my feet, kandi bracelets around my wrists and emergency hangover sunglasses permanently popped up on top of my head, my new image was a lean, mean, bandana-wrapped, sun-baked, bespectacled pirate with vaguely lesbionic Merrells. And a permanent squint.
Because these new glasses never quite worked out as good as they should have. By the time i got back from Colombia the frame was already disintegrating, probably due to the high temperatures and constant outdoor thrashing they had undergone in the previous year. The eye doc gave them a look and offered to do a full, free replacement under warranty. How could anyone say no to that?
I didn't say no to it, but when the new glasses came back, they never fit as good or showed the world as clearly as the old ones, even though allegedly they were exactly the same. But it takes weeks to order glasses in Canada, and by the time i got them in my hands i was heading right back out the door.
I made do for another 18 months, because that's my approach to life. Most of the time i just suffer minor inconveniences because i don't want to bother other people. I don't want to come across as entitled. I never return products. I'd prefer to trash the product and buy another one than be That Fucking Asshole that everybody working in retail and customer support hates. But even that i rarely do because i don't want to be wasteful. So most of the time i just deal with the jank. It's fine, you know? There's people starving in Africa, etc etc.
Well the past month or two i've found myself wheeling my chair to the front of the meeting room because i can't even read the massive fucking projector during meetings. I feel like i have gone near full-ass blind, it's ridiculous.
So this week i went in for an eye check and ordered new glasses. Taiwan is as efficient as China and can literally have your glasses and prescription ready in under 24 hours. I wore them Friday. I wore them Saturday. Today i went back and spent 3 fucking hours in there going back and forth with the optometrist trying to find out why - despite everything being much clearer - the new glasses were giving me a headache. Dear lord, 3 hours of me failing to find the words in Chinese for describing weird sensations inside my eyeball that i can barely describe in English was not fun. By the end of it i had a whole nother sort of headache.
I had to push back a lot on "well now you are seeing clearer it's going to strain your eye muscles more so you just need to get used to it", because i have heard that one before. I said, man, the issue is not the clarity. The issue is that one eye doesn't feel matched with the other one. I close my right eye, then the left, it takes 30 seconds for the right eye to refocus back on the thing i was looking at before. It feels like i got punched in the eyeball and no matter how many times i blink i still can't lose the haze. Am i blind? No, that was ableist hyperbole up there. Do i see better when they put that weird black eyepatch with the tiny hole in it over my lens? No. Do i need bifocals? Damnit, no. I just want to look out of my fucking glasses and not feel like the world is wobbling all over the place while my right eye zooms and unzooms like a bugged-out Borg implant.
They're going to try losing the astigmatism correction. I had the choice of -5.75 both eyes, which makes distant things somewhat blurry, or -6.0 both eyes which feels strenuous and slightly less blurry. Neither of them feel as clear as the -6.0/-5.5 with astigmatism correction that they gave me before, but also neither of them felt as wonky and "fake". I tried to explain i feel like i am walking around in a movie, like the world isn't real. It's not a pleasant feeling. I tried to explain that it felt like one eye was clear and the other was blurred, but then if i closed the clear one and just sat there for a minute or two then the blurred one got clear again, but then opening the previously-clear one left me with double vision. I tried to say "this is a fucking clusterfuck and it's driving me nuts", but i was probably driving them even more nuts.
God, i just hope that the plain old boring -6.0 lenses with no astigmatism correction will suck less. I picked the stronger prescription because i figure for close up work i can always fall back on my old glasses, since they're blurry at a distance but at least not completely useless at closer range.
Honestly, i am almost thinking of seeing if i could get corrective surgery again after this latest shit because it was so stressful. The worst part is i still don't know if the outcome will be any good. You don't know how much your eyes are going to hurt after wearing new glasses for a day or two until you actually wore them for a day or two. And i am already wracked with guilt and embarrassment for being That Fucking Asshole who went back to complain about something i bought. Perhaps i just have to accept that i will never see clearly again. This is it, isn't it? Yet another aspect of aging. Every other part of my body is disintegrating, why not the eyes too?
Fucking hell.
These are the things that - despite how desperately i want to throw away my job and just travel freely again - make me worry about my residence status, and my future. Sure i could go traveling now, bum around the world for a few more years, and it would be great. But someday i am going to be too decrepit to travel on a shoestring and too poor to travel in comfort and then i am going to be forced to settle down again. And at that point i might also be too old to work, so the settling down place better be warm and cheap and therefore not Canada or the UK. Getting a permanent residence in my back pocket now is insurance for later. But if i spend the next 5 years staring at a computer monitor, maybe that's the thing that's going to destroy my eyesight once and for all? Maybe i should go out and see the world now while i can still see?
Goddamnit.
Next weekend i am going dancing again. I hate this shit.