I began my journey with eyewear when I was 5 years old! My little fro and brown rimmed 70’s glasses made me supermodel material at a young age.

The first experience I remember in my spectacled life is telling my 1st grade teacher that I had glasses and needed to wear them to see the board. How geeky! My mom must have made me do it.

I graduated to the big step of contact lenses at age 13. My grandma and I got them together and it was a momentous occasion.

Because I had bad astigmatism, I was forced to get gas permeable lenses. Essentially, these are an advanced version of hard contacts which wore colluses on my inner eyelids. This meant I walked around for the first couple weeks with my eyes popped so far open and desperately trying not to blink that I looked like a deer in the headlights.

Even more challenging was trying to ‘pop’ them out of my eyes. There was a special maneuver where I pulled the corner of my eye to force my eyelids to pop the lens out. I’m not sure if I can truly explain how difficult this is to master. The first night I popped the first lens out like a pro. I was a contact lens natural!

The second lens, however, was not so successful. After 2 hours of pulling, pushing and rubbing my eyes I was actually further from getting lens #2 out of my eye. By this time my eye was so swollen from the prodding and tears that it was barely open enough to do the ‘pop’. At one point, we were in the car with the ignition running and ready to depart for the ER.
I pleaded for one last attempt.
Thankfully, it worked!

After many years of contact lenses, many misguided pops leading to family members disassembling the bathroom sink (thanks Greg!), I made the huge leap to Lasik surgery.
My life was transformed!!
I could see the clock in the morning and the bottom of the shower.
I could sleep in for 5 extra minutes and go to bed 5 minutes later as I didn’t have lenses to deal with.
I didn’t have to worry about falling asleep on the couch and waking up with my lenses glued to my eyes from dryness.
There were no more tears streaming down my face when the wind blew or I went for a cycle.
I was a new woman!

Five years after Lasik, I’ve gone full circle. Glasses Again.

The frames are still brown but with anti-glare lenses and more up to date frames. Fortunately, I’m feeling much more stylish than my bespectacled fro days.