Eyes

A few months ago I caught myself trying to read the back of a vitamin bottle and having to hold it away from myself to do so.

Oh, no.

This has happened to all my friends, one by one, but now it's my turn - I'm over 40, and I'm starting to lose my ability to read fine print up close.

Finally, this morning I went to the eye doctor, had all sorts of drops and tests (later, because my eyes were so dilated, a work colleague said I looked like a Japanese manga character), and found out the details. And they've got me thinking.

Sure enough, I have lost my near vision and will need one of the following:

• Lasik surgery. No thanks, don't need to mutilate my eyes for vanity, I'm unhappy about being 40+ but not that unhappy.
• Some freaky weird program of "monovision", where you wear only one contact lens, and so one eye can see close up and the other eye sees distance and your brain eventually learns which eye to use for what. This sounded like many days of splitting headaches to me, and lots of alarming blurry distance vision while driving. No thanks.
• Bifocals, that have reading glass on the bottom and clear glass on the top. Maybe, but would mean a commitment to a glasses-wearing look full-time. We'll see.
• Reading glasses that you wear just to read and then take them off. All the managerial ladies at work have these, so I have lots of role models and it's the favorite option at the moment.
• Or half-glasses that you peer down your nose into and can look overtop of. Also possible, if I find some cool ones.

So, that's all to be decided. But here's the freaky thing. I actually have prescription lenses in my sunglasses to see in the distance, but when they tested me today, my distance vision was fine and didn't need any correction. There's actually a history of decline and recovery there - I first got prescribed glasses in 1992, just before taking up my teaching position in Australia, and I wore them full-time for a couple of years - there are some outstandingly geeky photos of me during this period, big round glasses and a dorky Dorothy Hamill haircut, on a holiday in Cairns with the boyfriend of the time. Those first pair were the minimum available correction, but after a while I graduated up to the next stronger one.

But then got a more rock and rolly boyfriend, dyed my hair black, and the cut I had didn't look so good with the glasses on so I just stopped wearing them. And my eyes got better. I didn't need prescription lenses again until I started following Rugby League and found it easier with prescription sunnies to see the names on the players' backs at the games.

And then today, I find out that I've gone back the other way again. The eye doctor said that deterioration can happen if you do lots of close work - the muscles that focus the eyes on distant things can lose tone and not work so well. It's not the lens of the eye changing shape, it's the muscles that drive them that are changing. And I got those first glasses right after finishing my PhD, so that would fit. Gave them up when I was spending heaps more time galavanting around Brisbane with the new rock and rolly boyfriend than working - in fact I was just about to quit academia altogether. Needed them a bit again with all the dot-com computer jobs. And now that I spend more time in meetings than in front of the screen, and now that I drive a lot so I have to look further than three Surry Hills-blocks away, my distance vision is coming back.

I've got a poem in mind to write about this, something about how some changes are like water on a river stone, causing gradual change and reshaping (40 year old eyes) but other changes are created by one's own actions (existentialist theme).

But you know, it's easier for me to write a blog entry.