I Really Hate My New Eyeglasses

Back in August, I ordered a new pair of glasses from a new opthamologist and a new optometrist. When I put them on, the prescription was weirdly uncomfortable, but the technician said, “Give it three weeks. It takes that long for most people to adjust to a new prescription.”

Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s been almost three months and I have not adjusted to this new prescription. The frames are too big for my head and keep slipping down my nose, and while that’s on me you’d think the technician would have advised me on that difficulty during the fitting.

But worse, the grind is just … wrong.

I wear progressives, where the lens has three different zones: the top is for distance and driving, the bottom is for close-up and reading, and the center is “neutral,” with no actual lensing, meant for those distances where my vision is already comfortable focusing.

There is no neutral zone on these glasses.

“Seamless” progressives are made by carefully grinding the glass in a way that creates tiny transition zones between the working zone big enough to avoid the refractory appearance of lines as you used to see on old bifocals. The transition zones on these lenses are huge, almost two millimeters across.

Sometimes when I’m driving there is no zone on these glasses that is better than just taking them off. That’s a terrible experience for any glasses-wearer, and since I’ve been wearing lenes most of my life I know when a fit is good and when it’s not, and these are fundamentally the worst glasses I’ve ever owned.

I’m fortunate in that I can probably afford a new pair, from my old lab, out-of-pocket. But this is just annoying as hell. I’m wearing lenses two prescriptions old (getting the new prescription was occasioned by my dropping my previous pair, shattering one lens), and that’s still a better experience than wearing the new ones.

Not gonna name names until I've given the current lab a chance to fix the problems. I can afford new frames, but these lenses are just horrible.

The Doctors are Giving Mom Five Years, But Probably Not More.

I’m getting worried about my mother. She’s 82 and still whip-smart, although she has her days when all the technological demands of the modern world overwhelm her and she calls Omaha or myself looking for help.

82 is an age when medical issues have long ago become paramount concerns. Three years ago I helped my mother through a medical crisis, sitting with her for two weeks while she recovered from colon surgery. It was a harrowing time for me; Mom fills her days with loud television that battered my ADHD so badly in the end it took me weeks to recover. Intellects are delicate things.

But now the news is worse; she has a stiffening of her aortic valve, and the doctors aren’t giving her much time to live without surgery, but she can’t survive open heart surgery in her frail condition. They’re talking about replacing the valve with an artificial, stented valve; this is a new procedure that shows some promise, but unfortunately it doesn’t have a great track record. While the invasiveness and recovery time are minimal, the stent-plus-valve combination is mechanically weaker than a single-purpose valve and their estimated time-to-failure is five years.

It’s not easy preparing for the death of a family member, especially not one who’s so clear-eyed and communicative as Mom. And “some time in the next five years, definitely” is still vague enough, still long-term enough, to make anyone feel weirdly guilty about contemplating it now. But it’s time to start contemplating it for sure.