Andrew Wilkinson

Yesterday I went for another appointment at my opticians. Fortunately the blood vessel that caused me to stop wearing my last lens has now disappeared enough for me to be able to try a new type.

I'm going to be piggybacking lenses in my left eye, which as you can probably guess involves me wearing two lenses in the same eye. Has anyone out there in LJ-land heard of this before? I certainly haven't. It did give me really great vision and the oxygen permeability should be much better than the combined lens I was using, which will avoid the blood vessel growth.

I will hopefully pick the lens up next weekend and we'll see how it goes...

So the saga of my eyes is continuing, and I'm currently on my fourth contact lens for my left eye, but there is a good chance I'll need another. My last lens fitted well and I could see really well. However, it was not letting enough oxygen get through to my cornea, which responded by growing a blood vessel. As the cornea is transparent having a blood vessel in it is not only unpleasant to look at but it could cause vision problems as well. To counteract this I've got a new lens which has more holes in it and is slightly flatter to let more tears underneath it.

Will the change in lens cause this blood vessel to disappear, or will I need a fifth lens? I have a check up next Monday to find out...

I've been a full on contact lense user for the past week now, and it's definitely getting easier as time goes on. I can now put them in first time and wearing them for extended periods of time is not too uncomfortable, however the feeling of having something in my eye does not go away however many hours I wear them for.

The longest I have managed is 8 hours wear on Saturday, and 6 hours today. Unfortunately on both occasions my left eye has given me considerable discomfort starting a few hours after I took the lens out. My left eye is the bad one and I have a special lens which is has a rigid center with a soft outer part. The optician did say that this lens is prone to rubbing at the join, so I can only hope my eyes get used to it and it doesn't cause any further problems.

The improvement in my vision with wearing the lenses is so great that it really shows how bad my left eye is even with glasses, and I really want to wear them for ~14 hours a day. Hopefully my optician will have some suggestions in my checkup next week.

In other news, the DLR is really cool. For those who don't know it's a light railway system serving the East side of London. Not only is it overground so you get excellent views of Canary Wharf, the O2 and London City airport but the trains are computer controlled so they have big windows at the front instead of a driver's cab.

It takes a little while to get used to, but once you realise that it is going to stop at the station and you're not going to die it is quite fun, and an excellent piece of technology. If you have the option, stay on to Bank because the track dives into a tunnel and changes from the worlds worst rollercoster into a twisting, turning, ghost-train-like experience!

I used it because I'd just arrived at the aforementioned London City airport so Sunday combined my plane geekery with my train geekery and my computer geekery! I needed to have a bit of a lie down when I got home...

Today I had a contact lens fitting. It wasn't as unpleasant as I had expected, and while the lenses were uncomfortable after ten minutes or so it was ok. The biggest problem was that my eyes were watering bucket loads of tears which made it very hard to tell if the lenses were having an effect. I do think they will improve my vision considerably as they push the cornea of my left eye back into a more normal shape.

I need a hard lens of my left eye, and a soft one for my right which means that each requires a different technique for getting the lenses in and out of my eyes, but that's something to worry about when I have my training session on their use in a week or so I guess.