u/welcometravelers

So I've been having this blepharitis issue on the lid and lid/lash border for a good while. Chronic dryness from the lenses even with drops (Blink tears). At a certain point, my optometrist suggested using tea tree oil lid wipes on them. The ones out there are good. I started with Optase and now have been buying Noveha wipes because you get more bang for the buck.

My problem is no matter how lightly I gently wipe across from inside to outside corner, I still can quickly end up with the occasional white light flash on the outside corner of my left eye and some light floaters in both eyes. I've tried all sorts of alternate ways of doing the gentle wiping. Top to bottom, folding up the wipe and gently brushing across the lid/lash border... I'm wondering if I can even maybe get away with wiping once a day instead of twice?

Now if I were to stop using the lids for a couple of weeks, the flash/floater issues would subside, so at least that's good to know.

But I still want to solve the issue of course, so is there another way to address it? Maybe some kind of eye wash that doesn't involve rubbing the lids (which I guess are or have become more sensitive to the action over time)?

Sometimes I think about the K.K. thing and how that went down, and it seems a little sad that it never came back around. You kind of hoped that one day they might work it all out and pick up again. It didn't have to go that way. Sort of like that baffling explanation about how Rob ended up out of the band in the '90s because of a miscommunication or something. When you're all in a band for decades, fix your issues. Don't let them metastasize like a cancer.

Say what you will about Metallica and its use of a life coach, it worked, and ironed out a lot of internal interaction issues that kept the band going (I mean save for Jason Newsted, who decided it was weak to seek that outside help and opted out). Maybe Priest should have mediated its differences? Or maybe better management could have steered them all through that crisis better. Who can say?

So I’m getting my Scleral lenses next week. Already had my fitting. It’s the first big lens change I’ve made in 25-26 years and I would love for it to go well. I have Keratoconus and started with Soft Perms in the ‘90s, then was switched to Rose Ks in the late ‘90s, and then those Rose Ks were eventually piggybacked over Acuvues when the RGPs started causing too much dryness on their own. My current doctor told me that most Rose K patients have moved on to Sclerals and so I knew I needed to make the move as well, as my current lens combo still has a bit of that dryness/instability issue.

As many here know, the Sclerals are not cheap, so I borrowed the money from a relative (I had heard about VSP and EyeMed, and I have general Blue Shield insurance, but Blue Shield once told me they weren’t going to cover this).

I got a pang of anxiety the other night when I realized that I basically just bought the equivalent of a Les Paul guitar. The idea of handling a contact lens worth that much money is new to me (and my optometrist informed me that most of her patients pay in cash).

Any thoughts, advice or perspectives on wearing and handling from current Scleral wearers?

Finally, a group that really gets me! I feel like at last I'm finally just acknowledging the truth. That I'm just, as someone else put it, a nighttime person in a daytime world. That my energy in the daytime is just not the same as it is at night.

I've always felt somewhat lethargic in the daytime. I've never been a morning person, doing the early rise thing as a function of a work life spent over a couple decades in the business/office sphere (government, media, Internet and legal gigs) and after a significant medical hurdle just realized I wanted to rethink life and now feel like maybe I don't want to be in that grind.

Now that said, I don't know what other more eclectic thing I would do for income, but the world I've been in already no longer looks at me with interest anyway (and maybe it never really did and I just got lucky a few times). Even the process of searching the job boards in the daytime is harder. There are some days where it's the afternoon and I'm lying across the bed, awake, just not even wanting to get off of it because I feel exhausted and don't know what to do.

But at night, I feel like I'm more alive. Whatever I have to do as far as real productivity is actually sort of getting done. I don't know if on a bodily front the whole circadian rhythm thing has anything to do with all of this, but I definitely know that I feel less pressure to accomplish things when the business day is over and therefore I *do* seem to get more done. It's like the night frees me up from the pressures of the day and *then* I can act.

It feels like it would be a challenge to conscientiously shift my daily schedule to one that starts later and ends much further into the night because the world runs on daytime life schedules and the world has a way of making the rules.

Perhaps many of you can relate?