Ortho K lenses

[Sunnytomorrow]

Has anyone tried these and, if so, what has been your experience?

I’ve got a relatively high prescription (-5.00) but also dry eyes, and am in my first week of trying the lenses. The first night was a disaster as I didn’t put any wetting agent on the lens itself before insertion and woke with excruciating pain in my left eye as I had scratched the cornea. I then left my eyes for 4 days to ‘heal’ and tried again last night.

No pain (thank goodness!) although they did feel uncomfortable overnight. However, I was a little disappointed to find that my vision is only about half corrected. Is it worth perservering? My optician did warn me that it would take a week or two to have ‘all day’ corrected vision but I had (perhaps incorrectly) interpreted that as meaning my vision in the morning would be good and then it would diminish as the day went on.

Would love to hear experiences from anyone else who has tried Ortho K - good or bad!

@Sunnytomorrow I know your post is a couple of months old now but I'd love to know if you've persisted with the lenses and if so, how you're getting on? I've only just discovered this evening that this is a thing. My eyes are quite bad, -5.5 and I have some astigmatism in my left eye, and I'm intrigued as to how it works.

I used ortho k for years and loved it. Agree that hard to get used to at first, I had never worn contacts before and felt like grit in my eyes first few weeks.

My vision was -2 so not as bad as yours, but was perfect after one night and generally could do 2 days without the lenses with good vision. I think the longer you use them the better it works.

One of the things I really liked was that even without the lenses my vision deteriorated slowly, so no jarring blurriness like you get when you take off glasses etc.

Only downside for me was the cleaning, that felt like a chore.

Hi @theduckinatree; I’m still working on the lenses! The ones I used back in October didn’t ever work well so my optician re-scanned and sent me a new pair (Eyedream). These were better but still not perfect so I’ve eventually just been sent a different brand of lenses (Menicon). I haven’t tried them yet as was away a lot over December/Christmas so decided to give the lenses a break for a while, but planning to get started in the next week.

I’m perserving as really want it to work, but don’t feel entirely optimistic. I’ll keep you updated!

Just a quick update that I’m now on my second pair of Menicon Z and they work a lot better for me than the Eyedream.

Good news:

• The comfort is now totally fine at night. Initially when using Ortho K lenses I was dreading putting them in and didn’t know how I’d ever get used to them. This is no longer an issue. I can only mildly feel them now in my eye and they don’t hurt at all.
• My eyes are nowhere near as dry as they used to be with soft daily disposable lenses.
• My eyesight is much improved. I currently still use low prescription glasses, for driving especially. However there are now times when I don’t use glasses at all.

Bad news

• I’m still not totally glasses-free. See above. It’s been a slooow process with me, much slower than I had thought it would be. My eyes are still improving, however.
• I need to use drops both on insertion and removal. I use Hyloforte drops in both my eye and a couple of drops in the lens itself when putting them in. As they dry out a little overnight, I use several drops of a preservative-free wetting drop in my eye to lubricant/loosen before I take them out. This really helps.

I’ll update again if I ever manage to be glasses-free!

Thanks so much @Sunnytomorrow for coming back with an update. Hope things continue to improve for you!

Just updating to say that I never got the results I wanted with Ortho K (I think because my prescription was too high, and I’m a bit too old!) so eventually I gave up.

However, I ended up doing blended vision laser eye surgery instead and it has been brilliant!