A Lesson in Eye Care

I’ve been suffering from myopia, or nearsightedness, and have been wearing glasses since I started college. And back then, I’d always prefer wearing rimless glasses instead of rimmed ones since most of my glass-wearing friends and I thought they looked cooler (even though they were actually thicker than the rimmed ones). And I now believe that they actually looked dorkier. Ha!

And at that time, wearing contact lenses also became a fad. And, being an athletic person (I used to play basketball, table tennis, and soccer actively when I was a college freshman), I thought that I needed contact lenses, too. And so I begged my mom to buy me one.

And I can’t recall how often I’ve had contact lens-related problems. I remember a couple of times when I needed desperate medical attention because my eyes got infected because I was too lazy to clean my lenses or wear them for weeks without ever removing them. Ew!

I also recall when I thought I dropped one of my lenses in the middle of a soccer game, only to find out that it got lodged somewhere inside my upper eyelid for several hours! That was one scary episode!

I’ve learned a lot of things along the way to maturity(?), and one of the most important and hard lessons that I had to learn is to care for one’s eyes. The sense of sight is one of the most important senses we need to take care of. I’ve gone from a nearsighted grade of 125 to 400 throughout the 15 or so years. But I’m glad that it’s been stable for quite some time now. And so I’m thinking of having laser eye surgery one of these days to finally get rid of these contact lenses for good.

I guess it’ll give me a second chance to care for a precious gift that I ignored.