It is fair to say that my eyesight is poor. Appallingly poor in fact. To my unaided eyes the world takes on the appearance of having been smudged out of focus by an all-powerful Apollonian thumb. It has been poor, so far as I can recall, since I was cut adrift from the banks of childhood and into that foggy limbo of adolescence.
In fact, it may have been my fateful misfortune that just as soon as I began to notice how attractive some girls had become, I could no longer see them properly. It got so bad that if friends were walking on the other side of the street I would be unable to identify them, and hence existed for a while in a paranoid mist, unsure if these people I was steadfastly ignoring were actually people I knew or not.
Despite all this, I hated wearing glasses. I put this down to my misguided teenage vanity; my mindset being that what would put these newly attractive girls off me wasn't my acne or shit hair, but the fact I had two miniature windows hooked over my face as though it were some kind of prescriptive apparatus worn after a horrific car accident.
When I turned 16 I decided that my salvation lay within the medium of contact lenses. Of course, mastering the technique of deftly extracting and placing these little filmy bowls onto the surface of your waiting eye takes some perseverance.
I recall in my first week, hurrying to get ready to go out for the night and beginning to frantically scrape and rub one eye as I tried to remove the lens that had rebelliously folded over on itself. It was only after pinching and poking my now beacon-red eye for a few desperate minutes that I realised the lens had long since fallen into the sink.
Since then, my relationship with these translucent discs has matured into one of mutual respect - I appreciate the benefit they bring, but am equally mindful of the horrors they can inflict.
These days, as I tentatively lift one concave dome on a steady finger pad, I briefly imagine myself reduced to a microscopic level, capable of skating across its aqueous surface, wondering how colossal the surroundings would seem when magnified through such an intense optical crater.
I cannot wear lenses now for long periods without developing that knawing and pervasive sensation that I call 'cactus eyes' - so called because the reverse-sides of my eyes feel like they are being tickled, and eventually stabbed, by carefully aligned rows of hot needles, like a kind of anti-acupuncture. Aside from these avoidable irritations, there are still contact lens-related incidents that persist in haunting me...
Working on a supermarket checkout aged around 17, I had been clocking up some lengthy 10-12 hour shifts in the week leading up to Christmas. So run-down was my immune system by Christmas Eve that it left me flu-ridden and shaky, sat bleeping people's sausage rolls and party snacks through like some interminable production line of gluttony.
To compound matters still further, a suppressed sneeze sent one lens shooting off into the ether, leaving me watery-eyed, squinting and feeling like I was on some form of terrible hallucinogenic drug. I braved this out for about an hour, as I passed on my germ tidings to all and sundry before making my excuses and going home to bed, where I stayed throughout most of Christmas Day.
But this experience doesn't come close to the full horror of my university misadventures. Predictably, this involved getting so drunk that I would fall asleep without removing them. This occurred on the last night celebrations of both my first and second years; so that my only real recollection of drawing to a close another successful year of university life is of writhing around in bed like a blind and regretful mole.
What is faintly ridiculous is that the first time this happened, I remember awaking in the morning and for several bizarre lucid moments actually becoming convinced that my sight had somehow restored itself through the remedial agency of excessive alcohol consumption.
On the second year occasion, I was virtually bed-ridden for almost two day, as my housemates - finding the whole situations highly amusing - one by one said their farewells as I tried to muster some enthusiasm from the bed of my darkened room feeling like some kind of contagious leper.
The reason for such acute discomfort on these occasions (removing lenses before bed is now more or less a reflex action no matter how intoxicated), was explained to me in graphic detail by an optician, and I will relate this here (with apologies to the squeamish)...
On sleeping whilst wearing lenses, the eye becomes gradually suffocated due to lack of oxygen. What then happens is the cells on the very surface of the eye become conjoined to the lens, almost like a corneal version of the 'face-hugger' in 'Alien'. When the lenses are removed in the morning, they peel off that surface layer of cells that have accumulated, the same as a wax strip does with body hair. The raw and exposed cells that lie directly beneath have not had time to properly heal and until they do you are left to fester in darkened squalor, unable to open or focus them for any real period of time.
Viewed in this context, glasses really don't seem all that bad.
Horribly familiar, and well put!
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