Wayne Moses Burke

Well, here’s the first update on the experiment. It felt good at first, but I went too far. I wore the new glasses for about 2 1/2 hours, and methinks it was way too much. That’s when the headaches became pretty darn strong, and I had to ‘take a break’ and nap.

I think that I changed my prescription too much, frankly. This is what I did and what it means:

My current prescription:

Pupillary Distance = 65mm

Isn’t it cool that the left eye is the sinister one - it’s so true, isn’t it????

Anyway, the Spherical measurement is how far you have to be corrected all around to bring your eyes back to 20/20. Reading glasses are +1, +2 or whatever, and those of us that are near-sighted get negative numbers (to go with our sinister eye).

Cylindrical and Axis work together to correct astigmatism. Astigmatism means that you need a different prescription in different directions within your eye - it’s also called wonky eye (I made that up). It’s easiest to think of in terms of you things can be blurry up/down or left/right, and so it needs different corrections for each. So, the Cylindrical number represents the amount of additional correction needed along a different axis, and the axis tells what degree angle that other axis runs along. The axis is measured from the 0 degree line in a polar graph - that is, from the right side horizontal line going anti-clockwise. The Cylindrical number actually gets added to the Spherical number to get the full adjustment.

Pupillary Distance (PD) is the distance between your pupils in mm. I guess 63 is normal - I’m close.

Wikipedia has all the ugly details.

So, that’s where I started. I then thought to myself, “Self,” I thought… I don’t seem to have any problems when I don’t wear my glasses (headaches and the like), why don’t I immediately drop the astigmatism component. “That sounds like a fine place to start,” I agreed.

And then I made it worse. I was thinking about how the larger the jumps that I take, the fewer pairs of glasses I’ll have to buy before I can do away with them completely and thought I’d just drop a .25 off the prescription. I mean, it’s a quarter! What’s that doin’? Nothing! Or close to it. You can’t even buy gum for a quarter anymore…

So that’s how I ended up here:

The prescription of my new glasses:

Pupillary Distance = 65mm

Looks bad, right? Well, I guess we’ll find out.

Like I said, yesterday was a little rough. But I’ve been thinking about it and I’ve realized that when I used to get new contacts, they would make the world funny shaped and me a little dizzy for a couple of days. In addition, I’d have to work up to wearing them full time. So that’s what I’m doing now.

An hour a day until it feels good, then we’ll go from there.

On the bright side, I do have to say that as I wear them, it gets easier to see. Also, when I go back to my old glasses, I can see incredibly clearly. I don’t think this is just in comparison to having been blind for 2 1/2 hours, but legitimately better eyesight. Of course, it’s all subjective, right? Well, for now. If I can wear these new glasses full time, I’ll know that I’ve accomplished something.

In the meantime, the world is a little blurry around the edges.