Some Q&A on Blurriness
Here are some questions from my friend Patty:
Q: Is it the same blurriness as when you tried contacts?
Actually, my experience with contacts didn't include blurriness. I experienced more of the dryness of eye, sharp shooting pains when I didn't get them in right, and general sense of incompetence because I couldn't get them in consistently. When I finally did get the things onto my eyeballs, the resulting vision was quite clear.
Q: Is it slightly annoying? very annoying? tolerable?
It is annoying when I'm trying to see something at medium distance (like a whiteboard from 15 feet) or looking for a street sign because I can't focus. When I'm reading or working on the computer, it's tolerable because things blur mostly after 10 feet or so.
The Types of Haloes
I also think the halos are less noticeable than they used to be. I've developed my own little classification system for the different types of haloes I see.
- Snowballs. I see these soft, round balls of light around street lamps and headlights, especially in the fog (which we have gotten a lot of recently).
- Starbursts. These are like snowballs, except I also see distinct lines of lights radiating from the center of the light source -- kind of like when the Millenium Falcom jumps to lightspeed.
- Glowing. I see less distinct glowing across more diffuse light sources -- like a window with venetian blinds drawn or the LCD monitor I'm working on now. These halos look like what happens on your TV to bright objects if you turn the brightness up to high -- like what the photographers and videophiles call "blooming".