My dad just went for laser surgery on his eyes. He's amazed at what they can do these days. Then again, he's also on the far side of 60, so he's had plenty of time to watch them develop.

This, very much this. When you get your glasses, take a look at the thickness of the lens at the outside edge, and try to shoot for a similar lens shape and thickness in future pairs. I got one set that had a different thickness at the corners, and the distortion effect in my peripheral vision was enough to give me massive throw-up-and-then-die headaches after wearing them for any length of time.

Not trying to scare you off, for sure; this has only happened to me once in over 10 years of having corrective lenses for astigmatism, but it's something to watch for, especially since the optometrist and I kept thinking it was a flaw in the center of the lens causing the problem, which made troubleshooting an adventure.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

not...always. I'm astigmatic, but at slightly different axes and to slightly different degrees in each eye - it may only be something like 10 degrees difference (I don't remember exactly, offhand) but it's amazingly significant.

The real fun trick, to demonstrate what your eyes do, is to have someone look through one lens at something relatively square...then rotate the lens :)

I usually get a reaction of "how can you SEE? ugh!"

> If they
>don't, have the optician check the lenses against the prescription. I
>once received a pair with one lens's cylinder axis 90° from what it
>should have been (this has the effect of making the astigmatism
>twice as bad in that eye), and it took me like ten minutes to
>figure out what was wrong because I didn't think of closing one eye at
>a time. They will fix this for free, but unfortunately, it does
>involve sending the glasses back to the factory.

LensCrafters is actually able to make my lenses in-house, even with the high-refractive plastic (and invisicoat, which is ALSO nice to shell out for if you can afford it, and spend all day looking at a monitor). On the other hand, my astigmatism is somewhere in the 2-2.5 range, which is mild/medium (and I believe the scale on that IS logarithmic). My mom, on the other hand, has one eye at about a 1, and one at about an *8*.

To clarify, I meant what you see through one eye should be roughly as sharp as what you see through the other eye. Not that the lenses themselves should be the same for both eyes (indeed, they probably won't be).

Yeah, that's an astigmatism thing. They can fiddle with the diopters all they want, but since each astigmatism is unique (unlike simple myopia/hypemetropia), that's never going to hit the target exactly. (This is also why it takes so long to get the damn things, when for "regular" bad eyesight they do glasses in mall shops like ordering a pizza.)

>I'm not sure what Medicaid covers in that area -
>all I know is the one pair per three years general rule for Alabama, I
>can't remember it saying anything about costs of fitting and the like.

Fittings (frame adjustments and whatnot) are a thing most decent opticians won't charge for, at least around here. It's just part of the operational overhead to them, particularly as they rarely take very long.

--G.
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Also, as your brain gets used to the notion that it doesn't have to correct for the distortion anymore, your ability to tell what setting on the optician's testing machine makes things sharpest for you will improve.

I can't find it just now, but I read an article a couple months ago about using lasers to measure the exact shape of the cornea and then 3D-printing a lens that corrects for it in detail. The idea is that the simple "yea many diopters of cylindrical correction on this axis" astigmatism prescription can only ever be an approximation, but this tech lets you do much better.

<nod> Although only the 3D printing part I think is new; the last few times I've had an eye test for new lenses the tech used a machine that went <clunk> and fired a few zillion coherent photons at what I felt sure was the middle of my brain. ;)

Which reminds me, I'm due to have another test about now. BTW, while you're there, see what offers they have for coatings — my usual optician has a two-for-one deal, so I usually have the second pair tinted for driving in bright sunlight. Makes a big difference.

And the plastic lenses really do make a difference to the weight — I need pretty thick ones now (trifocals) and the first time I wore plastic ones, I kept forgetting they were there.

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