Thursday, August 4, 2016

Driving With One Eye

This isn't as tragic as it sounds.  I was headed to my regular appointment to check my blood clotting.  I pushed back on my glasses, and the left lens popped out of the frame.  At first I was afraid because I am pretty much blind without glasses.  Corrected right and uncorrected left produced something worse than a blur as my brain tried reconcile two discordant sets of data.  I  closed my left eye and prayed for safety.

It was not as bad as I feared.  Parallax between two eyes only produces depth perception for about fifty feet and there are enough other clues in traffic to avoid an accident.  At night this might be worse.  Two eyes give 1.414x the light of one eye.

Fortunately, I always keep my last pair of glasses in my car, so I could drive binocular vision to Lenscrafters for repair.

2 comments:

  1. I have a small collection of glasses, as they would often get damaged or misplaced or... something.

    I've never gotten the surgery because of cost and the fact that my line of work involves a lot of exposure to chemical agents and a lot of hands on with inmates. (I won't wear contacts at work because I've had to take them out after pepper spray and once is enough.)

    I try to buy new eye glasses every year or two, I'm fortunate the county insurance makes it fairly reasonable. So whenever a pair is smashed I can just grab a second set from my locker or my car. Sometimes a third set.

    But in my line of work, I learned the hard way to be prepared.

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  2. I've been buying eyeglasses online for some time now. It's quite a lot cheaper and means that poor as I am, I can have several pairs of glasses in my prescription "in case."

    Recently I had cataract surgery in one eye. Now that eye has much, much better sight than it did when I got my last prescription glasses (yay!) but I didn't have a new prescription until a few days ago (the operation had to heal.)

    Now I've ordered a new pair of glasses through Zenni, and can't wait to get them (should be tomorrow, I hope!) Until they arrive I'm stuck with my old glasses, which still work fine for my right eye but are way off on my newly fixed eye; means I have to keep that eye shut when reading or computing. It's a bother!

    I have had great results with Zenni Optical, and the bifocal glasses I've ordered will cost just under $40; the frames were only $9.95. These are for indoor use, reading & computing, but I'll soon be ordering new outdoor glasses which will cost more as I'll want tinting & perhaps some other options.

    Just thought I'd pass that along in case someone else was looking for low-cost but good quality glasses. Zenni can be found here: https://www.zennioptical.com/

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