Who doesn’t love a good contact lens? You’re free of glasses from your face, you can wear any pair of sunglasses out there, and you don’t have any possible glare from your glasses when you’re taking photos or driving at night (kinda true, there’s some great non-glare coatings on glasses these days, call us and find out!)! You’re either team glasses, or team contacts and there’s nothing wrong with that! As many of us have been fitted with contact lenses for a while now, we may have slipped into some bad habits over the years. This post will be a good refresher course on what you shouldn’t be doing with your contacts and some scary things that can happen to your eyes if you mishandle them!
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Times have really changed with contact lenses; some of you may be in the rigid contact lenses, some of you might be in a two week lens, one month lens, or a newer daily (ask us about dailies if you haven’t heard about them!)! Taking care of your lenses still hasn’t changed though. If you’re in the 2 week, 1 month, or rigid lens, you should still always take out your lenses if you are going to take a nap or go to sleep for the night. This is going to sound either funny or gross to you, but treat your contact lenses like you do your underwear! You wouldn’t wear the same pair of underwear for an entire month straight would you? Take them off, clean them off, and let them sit in the solution overnight! The reason we bring this up first is because this is such an easy habit for someone to develop to sleep in their lenses, but it also becomes the easiest way you can get a serious injury from your lenses.
One of the most major problems we see in our office is a contact lens related bacterial ulcer in your eye. Let me put my serious hat on for a second; but these are not fun to deal with and is one of the most common ways someone loses their vision because of contact lenses. If you aren’t taking out your contact lenses every night, your eye is essentially sitting in a pool of bacteria all day long, and the longer it sits in bacteria, the more of a chance you can get a really gnarly infection. The kicker to this is, if you have your contact lenses on while you have this infection, your eye isn’t getting the proper amount of oxygen to try to fight back against it! If you have an infection, you might notice that your vision is going to be very blurred even with your lenses on, you’re going to experience excruciating sharp pain, and your eye might even ooze green or yellow liquid throughout the day. All not fun stuff right? If this ever happens to you, please come visit us and we will get you started on the right treatment to get your eyes better before you lose your vision!
Alright, now that the super scary problem is covered, let’s talk about a less serious, but more common problem; dry eyes with your lenses! As we said before, when you have your contact lenses on for a long period of time, it acts as a barrier between your eyes and the oxygen rich air that surrounds us! The same way oxygen is important for our body and lungs, without oxygen in the eyes, things will start to feel very uncomfortable. You may notice that your contacts will stick like glue to your eyes, everytime you blink it feels like sandpaper rubbing against you, and things will just stay blurry all day long. I bet a lot of you just reached for your rewetting drops next to you, but you shouldn’t be having to use those everyday if you are taking care of your lenses and your eyes!
Last but not least, the last thing we will talk about is over extending your contact lenses more than you should. Contact lenses are only made to last a certain period of time. Someone is either in a one month lens, a two week lens, or a daily lens. The reason for that is that after that time for a contact lens is up, the material starts to break down and the contact lens becomes not as comfortable and safe for the eye. The longer a lens sits on your eyes past that time, the weaker it becomes, making it easier to get an infection, and the more it will actually change the shape of your eye underneath it. Now I know LASIK is a dream for all of us that needs glasses or contact lenses, but you wouldn’t want to risk yourself not being able to get the procedure in the future because you ended up with a bad infection or the front of your eyes became thinner because you stretched out your monthly lens for half a year right?
Contact lenses are great, we really love them! But at the end of the day, they are still a medical device that should be treated and used properly. It’s super easy to fall into bad habits, but we only have one pair of eyes, so let’s all take care of them properly!