focus

[adrian_turtle]

I have bifocals now. After more than 10 years of changing back and forth between reading glasses and distance glasses, I have to learn a whole different set of reflexes for looking at things. When to move my eyes. When to move my head and NOT my eyes.

I was fine with carrying reading glasses with me, even though it meant I couldn't just go out with what fit in my pockets. But it's tricky to change glasses while wearing an N95 mask and a broad-brimmed hat, especially when I don't have a table or even a lap where I can put down the pair I'm taking off. So I spent a lot of time in the wrong glasses. Unable to read the bus schedule on my phone or unable to see the bus stop sign telling me which direction the bus is going. Unable to find my way into the supermarket, or unable to read package labels. I appreciate how labels are color-coded and otherwise designed for the convenience of people who cannot read! But it's frustrating how often I bought the wrong thing, or had to ask for help.

Adjusting is ... not great
I woke up with a migraine 5 days in a row.
I stumbled and fell on a trolley platform yesterday. I very nearly fell off the trolley platform, so it was much more upsetting than it might be. I wasn't really hurt, but it was scary. It wasn't even one of the transit stops where the footing is particularly bad.

But the bifocals are great! They're great in the ways I had thought they would be. Even better, because my old distance prescription wasn't right. I can read my phone and read the labels on groceries and also see street signs. I can even see leaves in trees!

The problem is that I don't know how to look where I'm going, literally. When I wore plain distance glasses, my eyes were often aimed at the ground I was about to walk on. Especially when I was walking on rough ground, and most of the pavement in this neighborhood counts as rough ground. The line of the bifocals hides that "3 steps away" ground, and the "next step" ground I can see through the reading window feels harder to focus on than when I just walked around in reading glasses. Is this a solved problem? I presume some of you wear bifocals and look where you're going...do you tuck your chins or something?

Comments

[kareina]

I never needed reading glasses when I was young. I grew up nearsighted, and simply took off my glasses to read, and didn't, quite, get ink on my nose in the process (though I read with the left eye for the left page of the book, and the right eye for the right page, and never saw the rest of the world while reading). I remember briefly having bifocals as a child, but I kept taking off my glasses to read anyway, as reading is done lying on my back, holding the book over my face, and the bifocal part wasn't in the right spot for that, and the next pair of glasses were normal ones.

I switched to contacts after I got active in the SCA, in late high school, and they worked fine for both reading and distance, and all was good for some years. After dad died, in 1998, I used my small inheritance to pay for LASIK surgery (and getting my tubes tied, but that isn't relevant to this comment) and had 15 glorious years without glasses or contacts.

Then I started having a very weird problem--needing to hold things *further* from my eyes to be able to read them. Now, 13 years later, and my arms are still convinced that a book should be held directly to my face, and my brain doesn't like the reality that it doesn't work to read like that.

Now I have progressive lenses, so I can see my sewing and embroidery projects, and see distances, and they are good. They work to drive in, they work to see people I am having conversations with, they work for crafts. It is possible to find a position that works for reading. They do NOT work to see the screw on the underside of a cabinet over my head that I wish to tighten or remove. However, taking the glasses off, turning them upside down, and putting them back makes the screw kinda visible, and it isn't often that one needs to do this.

I remember hating the bifocals as a child, in part for that line, and the really abrupt difference between the two focal regions, and, it truly wasn't necessary, as nearsighted was, for me, kinda like having a magnifying glass always available. I love my current progressive lenses, except for those times when I want to read something both up and near, and I have to tilt my head so far that it hurts, to bring the letters into focus, or just remember to shift where the glasses sit on my nose.

I wish you luck in quickly working out what works for your eyes, and, if it becomes necessary to change out the bifocals for something else, I hope that your source for glasses has a reasonable "that didn't work, lets try something else without charging a fortune" policy.

[adrian_turtle]

From age 7 to my early 40s, I only needed one pair of glasses for distance. I mean one pair at a time. My eyesight was very bad, and while I could read without my glasses, I had to hold the book very close. It was usually more comfortable to read with my glasses but I would sometimes do the one-eye-at-a-time because the book was so close when I was reading in bed. It was so great when they invented ebooks for phones, because I could just make the print bigger and read in bed without my glasses.

In my late 30s, my distance vision started getting better a little less bad. Apparently, most people lose near vision as their eyes change shape in their 40s, but a few people get lucky and some of the change helps the distance vision as well. (Same thing happened to my father, so I recognized it. When my eye doctor at the time failed to recognize it, I changed doctors.) Then I started losing near vision and had to get reading glasses. My distance glasses let me focus at anything farther than arms' length, my reading glasses let me focus at anything closer than arms' length, and there was a little overlap where I could put my computer screen. In 2020, there stopped being any overlap.

I might try the bifocals upside down, but I don't know if I need to. Changing glasses when I'm wearing hat and mask is hard, and it would be almost as hard taking off and putting on the same glasses. So far, the bifocals have let me see what I wanted when I was sitting still. I'm looking forward to trying them for reading small Hebrew print outdoors (my old reading glasses didn't darken in sunlight, and these do.)

[evalerie]

I tried progressive lenses once, and found it a miserably unhappy experience. Whatever I wanted to look at was always in the wrong focus, and the reading part at the bottom was maddeningly incredibly tiny. They say to give it a month to get used to them, so maybe I didn't give it long enough -- I abandoned them after only a few days. I switched to wearing my reading glasses for looking at anything nearby, and going glasses-free for anything distant. That was years ago, and now my distance vision is a little bit worse than it was then, so I really should be wearing some kind of mixed-vision glasses, but after the last experience I am not eager to try that again.

It didn't occur to me to ask if the place I got the glasses had a "that didn't work, let's try something else without charging a fortune" policy. Thanks to Kareina for mentioning that they might. Also, my current prescription reading glasses are from Zenni Optical, so they cost me $26, which is a whole lot better than what opticians usually charge.

Anyway, I hope you can work out a way for bifocals to work well for you!

[adrian_turtle]

I have my glasses made by a local optician whom I trust with my life. He's expensive, but my eyes are so bad at coordinating vision that I worry about fit and alignment with ordering from someplace like Zenni. (I'm sure they're fine for most people. It's like with shoes; some people are easier to fit. In my case, I think it's an awkward combination of astigmatism, one eye being a little higher than the other, and my visual processing not being good enough to compensate.) When I was a kid, my parents had to take me back to get new glasses adjusted again and again and again until they would stop making me queasy. In upstate NY, I got some from a place that told me they fit when they didn't quite, and it was awful. The first few times I got glasses from Ron, I had to go back again and again for him to adjust them. Now he sort of looks at me, takes the glasses off, makes 3 adjustments, gives them back to me, and they're fine.

He's the one who warned me that I was likely to have trouble with progressive lenses because of the motion sickness. He said bifocals were easier in terms of motion sickness, but I'd lose the middle distance. (I have separate glasses for middle distance.)

[adrian_turtle]

If you don't do a lot of walking around and needing to change from distance to close vision minute to minute, you might be fine with a separate pair of distance glasses. They'd probably cost the same as your reading glasses. If you try this route, I strongly recommend frames that FEEL different from your reading glasses rather than just looking different. When I'm having trouble something, I often check if I'm wearing the right glasses (rounded wire or rectangular plastic) before checking if I have enough light or the window or screen is dirty or if anything else is wrong.