Eye Doctor

I just got back from getting my eyes checked: yes, they've gotten worse! I'm now at -4.00 in both eyes. Woot? It's about what I expected. I got the weird yellow numbing stuff - there cannot be any stranger feeling than having numbed tear ducts. I got the dilation drops, so my pupils are still large as dinner plates. But all of that is very routine, not very interesting. What was interesting, in my opinion, was the visit to the contact lens guy. I haven't been fitted for contacts since I first got them, which turns out to have been about 11 years ago. I figured he'd just measure my eyes, confirm that the size was right, and suggest a more expensive make and model of contact. He asked what kind I wear.
"Acuvue," I said.
"Oh, you mean Acuvue 2?" he asked. "Because Acuvue is really old, like their prototype disposible lens. No one really wears those anymore."
I said, "Sure, I guess. I don't really pay attention." Which is true. I was pretty sure it was just Acuvue, but whatever, I've been known to miss details before.
"Let's measure your corneas," he said. To be helpful, I offered up the numbers on my boxes of contacts, 8.4 and 14.0. "Oh, I guess you do wear Acuvue!" He said. "And I bet you have steep corneas. Only Acuvue uses 8.4; you'd be an 8.3 in Acuvue 2."
I thought to myself, "Great, contact lens sizes are like dress sizes now: totally arbitrary." He proceeded to use his weird machine to measure my corneas - the least unpleasent process at the eye doctor!
"Um, wow, well, that can't be right," he says from behind the apparatus.
"Hm?" I say.
"Well, by this measurement your corneas are flat, like really flat. I'll do it again, to be sure." So he measures again, and gets the same numbers. "Wow, um, someone really messed up when the last time this was done. You're nearsighted, so I would expect you to have steep corneas, that's pretty common. Nearsighted plus an 8.4 on your old contacts, that's definitely what I would expect to see. But your corneas are flat. Not just relative to what I expected, I mean there's steep, there's medium, and then there's flat and yours are flat. You're more like an 8.8."
I'm not really sure what this means, except that according to the contacts guy, not only were my lenses behind the times technologically, but they were actually too tight. I never had any problems with them, they never hurt or gave me dry-eye, so I didn't think it mattered. Then he gave me a pair that were the right size and prescription to try out. I will tell you what I told him. You know those commercials where some girl says, "Wow, it's like I'm wearing nothing at all!"? (Be sure to say that last part in a Teen Girl Squad kind of voice.) I always thought that was a little specious, like, "Of course you know you're wearing contacts, you can feel that they're there, you just don't think about it all day." Well, now I know that those commercials aren't specious at all - I was wearing poorly sized contacts! The second these new contacts touched my eyes, it was like they dissolved. I didn't have to roll my eye and blink twice to get it to lay flat, I didn't have to pull it out and start over. It was so comfortable, in fact, that I pulled my lid to the side and mimed putting on eyeliner, something that always dislocated my old contacts. Not even a little movement.
So hooray! It is totally worth it to get this stuff redone every decade or so. You know, just in case.