Simon Bradshaw

Over the last few months I've noticed my eyesight worsening again. A couple of years ago my near vision got bad enough that I had to start wearing glasses to comfortably read small print or work at a computer. The glasses fixed that - very nicely at first - but of late I was starting to find that even when wearing them close objects weren't as sharp as they had been. I also began to notice that the same problem was affecting my hitherto very sharp distance vision. The world around me didnt look blurred as such, but if I tried to read a sign a few tens of metres away it was definitely much harder to do so than it once had been.

The crunch though came when I began seeing double.

A couple of weeks ago I was finding my near-sight blur particularly noticeable. It seemed that one eye was worse than the other so I put a hand over each in turn. With my left eye, text was blurry, but with my right, it was a bit blurry and doubled. By 'doubled', what I mean is that it looked like I had copied a line of text in Photoshop, and pasted it a little offset and with the transparency wound up.

This felt Not At All Right and I spent an anxious half hour searching online. That actually reassured me, as it seemed that double vision in one eye only was a symptom of eye problems, whereas double vision only when both eyes are open can indicate all sorts of issues, many of them in the brain. But I made an appointment with my opticians anyway (who had in any case been bugging me to get my 2-year check done.)

That led to an hour-long eye exam, starting with a lot of health-related questions and moving on to a very thorough vision test that was cross-checked by a senior optician. The verdict was that my spherical aberration has not in fact changed, but that in the last two years I have managed to develop quite a significant case of astigmatism in each eye. Apparently my distance vision has slowly worsened to the point that I was close to needing glasses to drive, which was quite a shock to hear; I really didn't think it had got that bad. It's amazing what a good job the brain can do of integrating the input from two differently wonky eyeballs to get a superficially adequate field of view - until you try to see fine detail.

After some discussion of how I work (i.e. a lot of time staring at computer screens) the suggestion was two pairs: a varifocal pair for wear most of the time (and I was advised that I should wear them by default) and a pair optimised for correction at my typical monitor reading distance. The varifocals in particular were apparently not a trivial production job so I was told they'd be ready in a couple of weeks. Sure enough, today I got a text to tell me they were ready.

I had heard stories of problems with distortion and nausea adapting to varifocals, and although I'd bitten the bullet and paid for the supposedly lowest-distortion option I was a little apprehensive. Putting them on I found a little distortion looking side to side, but this was barely noticeable against how sharp everything looked. Not only for distance vision, but even objects within a few metres. The varifocal part worked fine as well, although I quickly realised I'm going to have to get used to reading close objects (like my phone when I get a text) by casting my eyes down rather than bending my head to look. 

Once outside, the walk though Birmingham city centre was a revelation. It's like I've suddenly found the 'Image Sharpen' command for my eyes, combined with a slight but noticeable improvement in contrast. Remembering to wear the new glasses shouldn't be difficult, not with this level of improvement. The computer-work pair are fine too; oh dear, I can suddenly see the point (quite literally) of a retina display...