Monovision Contacts

I collected my new contact lenses today. Am trying out these monovision lenses where one side corrects my far-sightedness and the other side, near-sightedness. Usually, the dominant eye will be corrected for distance. I was pretty amused at how my optometrist determined that my left eye was the dominant one.

It's pretty logical but I just never thought of it. What you do is - you hold a small ring or circular object with both hands straight in front of you. Then you put a distant object in the middle of the circle. Then close each eye one by one. The eye that can still see the distant object in the middle of the circle is your dominant one.

Anyway, back to monovision lenses.. This technique is for people who are not keen to use reading glasses but are slowly getting 'lau hua yan', or presbyopia. Isaacs says that our eyes' lenses hardens with age and it's less flexible, making it slower and harder to adapt to near vision.

Thankfully, it didn't take me long to adapt to the wierd sensation of having one eye blur at any one time. There is a slight loss of depth perception because one eye is focused at distance and the other eye is focused at near objects. But both eyes are clear individually because my astigmatism is corrected (which couldn't be done for disposible lenses). The brain learns to use one eye or the other for different distances.

By the end of the day, I see much better for distant objects - I could see bus numbers from quite far away. Night vision also improved. Let's see what happens in the days to come..