Red eyes, blurry vision and stuff like that

Quite a few people get a dry-eye feeling with contact lens wear – in fact dry-eye type symptoms would be the single biggest reason for people ceasing contact lens wear.

There’s a number of ways people describe dry-eye symptoms with contact lenses:

• ‘lens awareness’ – can feel the contact lens moving around, especially towards the end of the day.
• variable vision – perhaps getting better and then worse again, especially towards the end of the day.
• gritty feeling eyes, scratchy, lenses feel dry
• can’t wait to get lenses out in the evening

and while there’s more than one possible cause for each of these symptoms, but most of the time, its a lens gradually dehydrating over the day, with its surfaces gradually becoming less wettable, leading to a less stable tear film.

If you’re having troubles like this with your  fortnightly or monthly contact lenses, and perhaps even thinking of going back to glasses, it’s worth bringing up a month or two’s trial in daily disposable contacts.

There’s a few reasons why they might work better:

• a new lens each day means your starting with a perfectly clean lens – especially relevant if you’re cleaning routines with longer term disposable contact lenses is minimalistic.
• daily disposable lenses are made as thin as possible.
• there’s an added thing you can do with a contact lens if it’s only used once – use it as a delivery system for an eye lubricant.  Some brands of daily disposable contact lenses contain a wetting agent, like an artificial tear, that gradually releases over the course of the day.  (In fact its possible some day that daily contact lenses will be used regularly as a treatment in dry eye. )
• the Proclear lens material, used as a best-choice contact lens material for dry eye in longer term contact lenses, is also available in a daily disposable.

So the thing is this: if you’re contemplating giving up contact lens wear, a month or two’s trial in daily disposables will help you reach your verdict – because if you can’t get comfortable wear in daily disposable lenses, you’re unlikely to find any other soft contact lens that will work better.  On the positive side, you may well discover that you can wear contacts lenses comfortably after all.