Wigwam Jones

Recently had to go to bifocals for the first time. Well, it was a long run - I'm 47 this year, so I was pushing my luck.

I don't like bifocals. Not because of the inconvenience, not because 'people can tell', and not even due to the visible sign of my aging. I don't care about any of that stuff.

The reason I don't like bifocals is because I do not want bifocals. But I know I need them, and that's that. Nature wins.

So I got bifocals, and I let my local optometrist push me into those 'progressives', which are bifocals without a visible transition line. I didn't really want them, but I let him sell them to me. What a mistake.

First of all, even with my 'vision insurance,' my visit to the eye quack set me back 500 bucks or so, between the visit and two pair of cheap, crappy, glasses and frames.

I hated them from the moment they arrived, and for the first time in my life, I went back to the eye doctor to complain.

You see, progressive bifocals are NOT SHARP IN THE CORNERS. You essentially only have sharp vision when you are staring straight ahead. This is a requirement of the way progressive lenses are made. I was told I'd have to 'get used to it'.

Well, I tried. I wore the damned things for two years. I hated them. I told everyone I met how much I hated them. I responded in kind to backalley's lament about his eyeglasses. They stank on ice, is what.

Recently, one of the two pair broke, and I could not find the other. I had to resort to my previous non-bifocal glasses in order to drive to the eyeglass repair place to get my cheap-but-expensive crappy bifocals fixed.

I realized just how terrible the bifocals were, when I noticed how well I could suddenly see out of the corners of my glasses. I no longer had to twist my head around like a loon in order to see anything clearly. This made me VERY ANGRY.

I resolved to fix the problem, with proper bifocals with a line in them.

I also decided I had had enough of shopping mall eyeglass quacks. I have vision insurance, but again, it covers only the kind of optical places one finds in shopping malls and large discount stores where the parking lot is always full of oil slicks from the ancient cars that park there, if you know what I mean.

So I found an ophthalmologist by going through the AMA's website, looking for board-certified eye surgeons who were affiliated with high-end hospitals and who also had a private practice. Found one nearby. Of course, he would not take my cheesy insurance, but I did not care - I was willing to pay him out of pocket for a REAL eye exam, plus a high-quality prescription.

My eyes are pretty messed up anyway. I'm color-blind, profoundly so. I have severe astigmatism in both eyes, and it is such that I am left with yet another fun little problem - permanent monocular diplopia, which is a fun way of saying double vision in each eye. What I mean is, with one eye closed, I can still see two of everything. I have it in both eyes. Doctor did not believe me at first - they never do - but he confirmed it in the course of his examination. He told me that people say that all the time - it is almost never true, and very rare. Whoopee, I'm rare.

However, good news... my monocular diplopia doesn't bother me. I've been seeing this way all my life, I adjust it automatically in my mind. It also lets me do all kinds of fun things like intentionally decouple my eyes and let them go all fuzzy if I feel like it. Lots of fun in meetings, I made a woman nearly pass out once, when she thought I had gone insane right there at the meeting. She never saw eyes wander around independently like that. My wife won't let me do it at home.

Anyway, this strange and exotic disorder, which no one can do anything about anyway (no, prisms are not appropriate for my version of diplopia, apparently), also qualifies me to get covered under my regular medical insurance for my eye examination (not frames or lenses, though). So that was a freebie. Good - I pay a lot for health insurance and never use it, healthy as a horse.

Now - here's the fun part...

See, eye doctors, whether they are ophthalmologists or optometrists or dispensing opticians or whatever, are not like medical doctors in one major way. They are in business not just to make money, but to sell glasses (or contacts or lasik, etc). Yes, they want you to see better, but they also want to sell you a ridiculously-overpriced junky pair of frames and lenses.

It is so bad that there is a federal law that these guys are required to give you a copy of your prescription - but it took that law to make them do it. They don't WANT to give you a copy. They want to SELL you the glasses as well as doing the examination. You sometimes have to BEG them to give you what you paid for.

They are also required to give you another critical piece of information, called the PD or pupillary distance, which is the distance between your pupils. Necessary for buying glasses. And they also have to be pummeled into submission to give you this measurement - they REALLY don't want you to know it.

Because if you had that info, you could shop for the best price on frames and lenses. Oh, the horror.

So I found this website - it's a blog, really, and it is run by a guy like me who got fed up with the high prices of frames and lenses. He figured out how to buy them himself online, and he did. Then he wrote about it. Now he's got lots of people doing it, and writing about it, and so on. He has a few links to places that sell them online, with reviews by people who have bought glasses there, and etc.

I decided to give it a try. If it didn't work, I could always just take my cheap vision insurance card down to the mall and let a teenaged pimple-faced girl sell me a pair of overpriced crap frames and lenses in between texting her skank hoebag friends on her cell phone and staring at her nails.

I found a place, picked a frame, put in my prescription, paid $45 plus $5 shipping. They said 4 to 6 weeks.

Took less than two weeks.

I love these things. Plastic lenses, thin lens, UV coating, anti-glare coating, everything my old glasses had except Transitions for turning dark in the sun. But believe me, that's not worth $450 extra that represents the difference between my old glasses and my new ones.

Yeah, I paid $50 total. Not $500, but $50.

And I found out some other things too. Like you know when you ask if you can just get new lenses put in your old frames and they give you that look and say "No, sorry, they don't make those anymore," and then you have give your old frames away to Lion's club? Well, that's a lie. There are plenty of places online that will re-lens your old glasses - or vintage glasses that you can buy on eBay.

Man, I am so happy about all this, I'm even not mad at all the lies I've been told over the years by quacky-doodle-do eye doctors.

So I'm passing it on.

My script:

DV OD: -6.25 CYL: +2.75 AXIS 4
DV OS: -6.50 CYL: +3.25 AXIS 4
NV OD: +1.75
NV OS: +1.75
Remarks: VO=12.5

And here's the website of the blogger...

www.glassyeyes.com

I don't know the guy, don't have any business or financial dealings with him whatsoever, no interest in any eyeglass companies at all of any kind. Just passing on scoop.