Varifocals and antimetropia

[Helen1625]

Hi

I had my eyes tested a week ago and I have one eye that's long sighted and one eye that's short sighted.

Dist
Right eye
Sph -2.25 Cyl -0.75 Ax 132
Left eye
Sph +0.50 Cyl -0.75 Ax 56

Near
Right eye +1.75
Left eye +1.75

I went to collect new varifocals yesterday. The top part of the lens was great. I could see nice and clearly. I looked down at the bottom of the lens to check the reading part and I was seeing double. I was reading a sentence on the card I'd been given to read. My right eye was reading the sentence. My left eye was seeing the same sentence, but about an inch below where the right eye was seeing it and it was slightly going diagonally across the page.

The optician said I will need separate reading and distance glasses in that case and they're now on order.

However, I'm sat here thinking, if I was seeing double with the reading part of the varifocals, will I not just be seeing double when I have single vision reading lenses too? Just trying to understand why this would happen. Could it simply be that they'd messed up the reading part of the lenses at the lab?

Has anyone had any experience of this?

The imbalance in the lenses is more noticeable as you look away from the centre of the lens (the lens will have been centred to where your pupil is). This is called ‘differential prism’. Not only would you have this, but also ‘aniseikonia’ which is a difference in retinal image size caused by different magnifications. In a single vision pair, although you’ll get the different image sizes, you’ll also be looking through the centre (in theory, if it’s positioned correctly), so the prism imbalance is minimised.

Have you tried contact lenses? They work fantastically for Rx like yours. You can also have varifocals with opposite prism made into the lens, but that can cost a lot of money.

How do you cope without glasses? Apart from the astigmatism, you’re almost perfect monocularly! (Meaning one eye for distance, one for reading).

Thank you for this explanation.

I used to have contact lenses many years ago (prescription wasn't so strong back then) but I gave up on them as I was getting a lot of irritation in one eye. I think I would try them again now though, perhaps that could be my next step. The optician mentioned it a while ago, either a varifocal contact lens (which I couldn't fathom for the life of me how that would work) or a single vision contact lens worn with glasses.

I think I've just learned to manage. I can see, I can just feel an imbalance, like I know when one eye is doing more work than the other. The optician said it's like having monovision, each eye knows what it's got to do and effectively takes over when it needs to. I have been feeling more discomfort with it of late though, hence I knew it was time to do something about it.