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If you wear high-index glasses BEWARE!!
2 years ago
General
This is kind-of a rant, but there's a lesson and warning here for those people out there who have thick lenses in their glasses. Read on.......
If you haven't seen me in person, I wear glasses--thick, high index glasses. Been wearing them since I was like 2 years old. My prescription is +14. To put that in perspective, the highest index you can typically get at a drug store is typically +2 or +3.
All my life I never worried about getting glasses because all the good labs were familiar with the kind of lenses I need for my glasses. Well, I got the rug pulled out from under me last summer when I decided to get new glasses for the first time since 2004. Went to the best eye glasses place in the city. Paid $$$ for a new pair. They came back. Lenticular lenses. Wrong kind of lenses. These are flat lenses with a "bubble" in the middle that has the actual prescription. Told them no good. They tried again. Two-sided Super-modular lenses. Completely horrible pincushion distortion and useless. Told them no good. They said that was the best their lab could do. I got half my money back. They tried to blame the prescription my doctor gave me so I had him re-do it. Same result. Now we're up to October.
This was when I started doing research and found out that my kind of lens stopped being common around 2007. See, my kind of lenses are/were popular for people who had cataract surgery and had their natural lens removed. Well, medical science has advanced and now surgeries are better and artificial lenses replace the natural ones that were removed, so people didn't need those thick lenses anymore.... EXCEPT ALL OF US OVER 40 WHO HAD CATARACTS AND DO NOT HAVE NATURAL LENSES and can't have artificial lenses due to complications.
In my frustration I even went back to my old eye glass place in Minnesota during a visit and tried to find out if they could get me new glasses. Oh, but my last order was in 2004 and so of course they had thrown out all my records so they didn't know me from Joe Diddly--even though I'd been getting my glasses there FOR FOURTY YEARS!! Argh! At this point I threw my hands up and accepted that I am doomed to never get new glasses, and one day these will break and I'll be fuck out of luck. That was December.
Fast forward to about a month ago where I had gotten over my depression on this to try again. I ended up at a local place that was a referral from a referral. Told them the whole story. They took one look at my glasses and said a phrase that broke my brain: "Oh, we've done these before--we've even done stronger than this." There was still some back-and-fourth on if they could actually do my type of lens and they said some words I didn't like (super-modular). This time though I was ready to try my trump card. I had a spare lens from an older pair of glasses. We would send it to their lab so that there would absolutely be NO QUESTION if they could make that kind of lens or not.
This week I got the word. The lab got it. They said they can make it. I went in and ordered frames and lenses.
Now comes the waiting. Will the lenses be good or will this be another fuck-around? Did they write the order correctly, cross all the t's and dot all the i's? Did they disregard that note about the press-on my doctor neglected to remove from my prescription sheet that was a carryover from an experiment we tried last summer? I hate being a Negative Nancy on this but after all I've been through I don't trust anything and doubt everything.
I guess I'll find out in about 3 weeks.
Sooooo, yeah. If you have thick lenses in your glasses, better check your place to see if you can still get lenses.
If you haven't seen me in person, I wear glasses--thick, high index glasses. Been wearing them since I was like 2 years old. My prescription is +14. To put that in perspective, the highest index you can typically get at a drug store is typically +2 or +3.
All my life I never worried about getting glasses because all the good labs were familiar with the kind of lenses I need for my glasses. Well, I got the rug pulled out from under me last summer when I decided to get new glasses for the first time since 2004. Went to the best eye glasses place in the city. Paid $$$ for a new pair. They came back. Lenticular lenses. Wrong kind of lenses. These are flat lenses with a "bubble" in the middle that has the actual prescription. Told them no good. They tried again. Two-sided Super-modular lenses. Completely horrible pincushion distortion and useless. Told them no good. They said that was the best their lab could do. I got half my money back. They tried to blame the prescription my doctor gave me so I had him re-do it. Same result. Now we're up to October.
This was when I started doing research and found out that my kind of lens stopped being common around 2007. See, my kind of lenses are/were popular for people who had cataract surgery and had their natural lens removed. Well, medical science has advanced and now surgeries are better and artificial lenses replace the natural ones that were removed, so people didn't need those thick lenses anymore.... EXCEPT ALL OF US OVER 40 WHO HAD CATARACTS AND DO NOT HAVE NATURAL LENSES and can't have artificial lenses due to complications.
In my frustration I even went back to my old eye glass place in Minnesota during a visit and tried to find out if they could get me new glasses. Oh, but my last order was in 2004 and so of course they had thrown out all my records so they didn't know me from Joe Diddly--even though I'd been getting my glasses there FOR FOURTY YEARS!! Argh! At this point I threw my hands up and accepted that I am doomed to never get new glasses, and one day these will break and I'll be fuck out of luck. That was December.
Fast forward to about a month ago where I had gotten over my depression on this to try again. I ended up at a local place that was a referral from a referral. Told them the whole story. They took one look at my glasses and said a phrase that broke my brain: "Oh, we've done these before--we've even done stronger than this." There was still some back-and-fourth on if they could actually do my type of lens and they said some words I didn't like (super-modular). This time though I was ready to try my trump card. I had a spare lens from an older pair of glasses. We would send it to their lab so that there would absolutely be NO QUESTION if they could make that kind of lens or not.
This week I got the word. The lab got it. They said they can make it. I went in and ordered frames and lenses.
Now comes the waiting. Will the lenses be good or will this be another fuck-around? Did they write the order correctly, cross all the t's and dot all the i's? Did they disregard that note about the press-on my doctor neglected to remove from my prescription sheet that was a carryover from an experiment we tried last summer? I hate being a Negative Nancy on this but after all I've been through I don't trust anything and doubt everything.
I guess I'll find out in about 3 weeks.
Sooooo, yeah. If you have thick lenses in your glasses, better check your place to see if you can still get lenses.
Luckily, I haven't had too much trouble getting proper glasses, except that it usually takes two to three weeks to get a pair made. The last new pair I got was last year.
I hope the pair you're waiting for turns out good.
I especially love it when trying to call them to make sure, and the person who answers the phone writes your request poorly and the next person interprets the request oppositely of what you were trying to communicate.
Like the time I called to ask "Should my mum be on this medicine the hospital gave, or was that a one-time thing?", person had no idea wtf I was talking about, they got frustrated and/or confused and hung up on me but went on to ask the doctor anyway...
...Me being hung-up on, I immediately called back and asked the next person the same question, they too ask the doc, doc says "no it's not needed", they tell me "no it's not needed", and... somehow two staff asking the doc the same question for the same patient in a 5-minute timespan caused them to send a new prescription over in spite of saying "no it's not needed". Leading to much confusion at the pharmacy.
I need new glasses, myself. I knew that prescription was going to be too weak, would rather have had it biased a half-step too far over a half-step not enough. Oh well. Find myself holding my glasses at a tilt, backwards, in front of my face to look through the stronger lens with my better eye to read things fairly often. Don't get me started at how the optic shop sold me "youth lenses" which means the lens is plastic which means any attempt to clean it with less than a spotless microfiber cloth scratches it, so I only clean it every month or two and deal with the dandruff on it in the meantime. Bleh.