Prism corrective lenses

[ex-khobar Andy]

Maybe this is old hat to some of you but it's new to me.

For a few years now I've had steadily worsening double vision in which the eyes do not focus well. The image is clear enough but I end up seeing two images. Watching a singles tennis match on TV sometimes looks like doubles. In the last few months I have noticed that sometimes when I am driving I close one eye just to make sure that there is one car ahead of me and not two.

I went to the opticians last week and mentioned this to the optometrist. "Oh, we can correct that." she said. Apparently there are many causes for double vision: the problem is either in the eye muscles which get lazy or weaken as you get older, or in the brain which cannot do the normal job of superimposing the two images into just one. If I look at an image on the wall 10 feet from me, my double vision is about 3" horizontally and about 1" vertically.

For about $35 they added prisms to my prescription. So far I have had these for one day but already watching sports on TV is transformed. I have not tried driving yet - they said get used to them first, give it a day or two before you drive in them. I'll let you know. I've worn glasses for around 70 years now - the family story goes that I was learning my numbers and on a rainy Glasgow night my father asked me "What's the number on that bus?" and I replied "What bus?" I was four. Anyway - I had never heard of prism correction until last week. But they work.

[Bicycle Bill]

I knew someone who had a pair of these over twenty years ago, so it's definitely not something new.

And think of the fun you can have when someone says, "Darn, I don't have my glasses" — and you whip yours off and say, "Here, try mine."

-"BB"-