Left eye, right eye, and a cuckoo

I’ve just, this moment, heard the first cuckoo!

Well, my first cuckoo. If you don’t live in England, you may not know that Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring is one of our little obsessions and there is always an excited letter in the paper saying “I heard it first.”

I’ve been to the opticians for an eye test. I came out happier than I went in.

For the last three years, I’ve been wearing multi-focal contact lenses, as I am slightly short-sighted. This has been fine until recently, and still is most of the time, but I’ve realised in the last few months that my right eye has been a little more near-sighted than my left, and since I’m quite decidedly right-eyed, this is inconvenient. I explained this. She checked my right eye. Then she asked me to read the chart with my left.

“It all looks out of focus!” I said, startled. I closed my eye and tried again, she checked to see if there was anything in my eye, and then she took the lens out. “Er, you had it in back to front,” she said. It was a new (monthly) lens yesterday, I must have been wearing it the wrong way round for two days.

At the end of the examination, she agreed that my right eye wasn’t so good, but she thought it might be a bit of eye strain, from reading small print. I told her that, if I know I’m going to have to read a lot of small print, I only put in one contact lens (the right one), as I know it can be a bit difficult to see. “If I give you a stronger lens, you might be back in six months saying it’s got worse again,” she said. I felt worried. She pondered.

Then, she suggested giving me a weaker lens for my left eye. This will make it easier to read small print and, since I was unaware that I had blurred vision all day, I probably won’t be aware of it. It will give my right eye a chance to recover and take over as the stronger eye again. She’s ordered two lenses, -1 and -1.5 (I normally wear -2 in both eyes) so that I can see which is better.

I think this is a marvellous idea. I hope it does the trick.

7 comments on “Left eye, right eye, and a cuckoo

  1. Z

    No, I can see why you can’t, it’s peculiar. I’ve been aware of it for a few months though, so I know it happens and I can’t help it.

    If you’re right handed, even if you hurt your right arm you will still instinctively use it, as it’s the dominant one. It’s the same with eyes, but you can’t even choose to favour the stronger one if it isn’t the dominant eye.

    I don’t know if her suggestion will work, but if her theory that my eyesight hasn’t got worse but that the eye is overstrained is right, I think it might.

    If it doesn’t do the trick, I’ll suggest a single-focus lens in my right eye, rather than a multi-focal one.

    Reply
  2. luckyzmom

    Hoping the new lens work well for you. I have been wondering if all the new strain my eyes get since I started blogging could be affecting my vision.

    Reply
  3. Z

    LZM, my sister works on a computer all day, she already has eye problems and it doesn’t help at all. I don’t think blogging – reading or writing them – is a problem for me, it’s when I’ve got a lot of documents to type that I notice my eyes getting dry and tired, and realise I need to take more breaks. Blogging, I either stop and think about a post or dash off one quickly.

    Pat, I’ve only had lenses 3 years and it took me months to become proficient at putting them in. They’ve always been comfortable to wear though.

    Reply
  4. dharmabum

    i can see well without any appendages – atleast for now. thanks god! coz i can’t imagine putting on something INSIDE my eye – the sight of people doing it, why the very idea sort of grosses me out. i’d rather do with spectacles šŸ™‚

    Reply
  5. Z

    Vanity, partly, and also because I’d have needed more than one pair of spectacles. I’d have had to read without glasses, have a pair for distance and another for organ-playing and the computer. I’m so disorganised, it was bad enough having one pair I didn’t wear all the time and constantly lost.

    I don’t mind poking myself in the eye at all.

    Reply

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