This is decidedly not a political post.
I am a long-time wearer of corrective lenses. I think I got my first pair of glasses when I was 5 or 6, and went through a steadily-increasing set of prescriptions that would make a Coke bottle jealous. (Sight-y thicc.) Some 5-6 years after getting my first pair of glasses I looked into contact lenses. The doc told me that my astigmatism was so severe that the only contacts that would actually work to correct my vision were gas permeable - i.e., “hard” - lenses. They did not, in fact, work for me; they were awful, irritating, they hurt my eyes, and I’d already been wearing glasses for long enough that it wasn’t a burden to simply abandon contacts altogether and go back to wearing glasses.
Fast-forward 20 years and the story is different. Now they have disposable “soft” lenses that can correct my vision. They come with some downside - they are toroidal (not round), so there is, in fact, a “wrong” way for them to be situated in my eye. The fix for this is basically to keep blinking until you can see… which makes mornings a bit of an eye-hassle, but hey, one adapts. So, some time in my late 20s/early 30s I started regularly wearing contacts.
[Interesting side note: apparently if you have bad eyesight from a young age it tends to degrade over time up until about your 30s…at which point it “stabilizes”, and in some cases actually slightly improves*. This was news to me.]*
Anyhow, I order a one-year supply of contacts at my annual eye doctor visit. They come in two boxes containing six contacts apiece, per eye - four boxes total. Nominally that means I should be swapping out contacts - both eyes - once a month. I dunno how you live your life in terms of personal discipline around these kinds of things, but the reality is that I wear them until they get uncomfortable. This is typically longer than one month (don’t tell my eye doctor, he’d probably gripe at me). The upshot of this is that I generally have boxes “left over” when I get new ones.
The interesting bit here: at some point I realized I had 4 boxes (3 and a partial) of left contacts, and only 3 boxes (2 and a partial) of right contacts.
Huh.
So I started thinking about this, and started paying attention to possible reasons why I might have been using more right contacts than left over time.
“Do I somehow ‘use’ my right eye more/in a different way than my left?” (I don’t think so.)
“Do I regularly get poked in my right eye?” (No.)
“I’ll bet it’s the damn dog’s fault.” (Probably not…but still suspicious.)
The breakthrough came when I started paying attention to how I put my contacts in and take them back out. When they’re in my eyes they don’t readily fall out, and when they’re in the case they’re bathed in saline and secured with screwed-on lids…but when they’re in transition that’s relatively high-risk, right? In that state change is when contacts get dropped down the sink and discarded.
…and I always put in my right contact before my left contact.
…and I always take out my left contact before my right contact.
Not by design, just by habit, established over years.
And so.
When I have to dump my right contact into my hand, locate it, load it onto an index finger, and then direct it into my right eye, I’ve already taken off my glasses and have effectively zero vision (seriously, my eyes are fucking terrible).
…and when I take out my right contact and have to maneuver it into the case, I’ve already taken out my left contact and have effectively zero vision.
QED.