Day 194..#I Figured It Out..

Exactly the same ones I have..Image Courtesy of Google Images

I have finally figured out what has been causing me to have so many headaches and it’s probably something that would be so obvious to another person..but I didn’t realise.

Okay..I wear contact lenses and I also wear glasses. Before I came to Portugal I primarily wore contact lenses. I wore my glasses, but not very often.

Due to me transferring to Portugal for a year, I had to pack up all my belongings from University and move them back to my home in London, so there were a lot of packed boxes and suitcases. Amongst all the packed boxes, I misplaced my next 3 month supply of contact lenses which would have lasted me until I went home for Christmas in December and was due to receive my next three-month supply.

My check-up was also due for my lenses. I decided against doing the check-up before I left because I was informed that the opticians were not able to post my lenses out to me and as they did not have stores in Portugal, I was advised to wait until I returned a year later, perform my check-up and restart my lens package. So I decided that I was fine going for the latter option and bought two new pairs of glasses.

My eyesight is not terrible..but it’s also not 100%.

In the summer I am used to wearing sunglasses..and because of my contact lenses I can see fine. Being in Portugal and it being so sunny (This isn’t me complaining! I love it 😛 ), it was annoying to me that I couldn’t wear sunglasses..actually I could, but my vision wouldn’t be perfect because it takes my eyes a while to adjust.

Anyway, I decided that maybe I should go to the opticians and depending on the price, purchase some daily contact lenses. This is where the problem started.

The optician asked me for my prescription. One of my eyes is better (I don’t know if I can use that word, but I mean to say that one eye is marginally sharper) than the other eye..so I have two different prescriptive lenses for my eyes..but I always forget which side is weaker than the other.

Anyway, she asked, I told her but I also told her I didn’t know which was which. I was wearing my glasses at the time. She asked me for them and placed them on a machine and the machine read my lenses and produced a prescription, allowing her to confirm which prescription was for which eye. It was such a cool machine!

After that they pulled out the draw and started getting the contacts ready for me. She talked me through it, I paid and left.

I have been wearing the contacts on and off since and only recently realised the problem yesterday.

For my eye that was sharper than the other, I was given the wrong strength lens. It was TOO strong. I looked at the prescription and the contact lens was 0.25 of strength greater than what my prescription was supposed to be.

I know, you’re probably thinking how did you not notice that? Or I’m sure that wouldn’t matter? But it wasn’t something so marginally obvious to me and it did matter.

I’d get headaches after wearing my lenses for more than 6 hours even though they could be worn for up to 12 hours and the eye that had the incorrect prescription would always irritate me (so I’d rub my eye, or move my lens around until it got comfortable again, etc). I explained it away to myself by saying that my eyes probably were not used to contact lenses any more from the long period I hadn’t worn them for..couple that with my hayfever, I just thought that it was a bad combination of the two.

The wrong prescription? *sigh*

I went back to the opticians and explained that they’d given me the wrong lenses and she apologised and offered me a replacement, I took the replacement lenses, but I think my eye does need the rest as it was a little irritated all day yesterday.

I’m glad I finally figured it out..we’ll see how it goes in the future, but I’m pretty sure those headaches stop now.

Have a great day!!

~ by originalapplejunkie on July 12, 2012.