Carol’s Column

No longer making a spectacle of myself

The end of the last century passed in a haze because of my deteriorating eyesight.

Probably everyone knows that eventually eyeballs seemingly change their shape, eye muscles get tired and the bottom line is that your sight is not as clear as it might have been before.

For most, spectacles are the answer.

There are people who have worn specs all their lives who retain the same pair for ever.

Their lenses might change, but they use the same glasses year in and year out.

My bad luck comes in threes. I am unlucky in the Lotto (I have yet to get one number), I am unlucky with builders and I am unlucky with glasses.

There are abandoned Carol pairs lying around the streets of South Africa where they fell when I placed them on the roof of my car and drove off.

I have sat on my glasses and squashed them countless times, driven over them and inadvertently torn off the hinges and side arms.

I have lost them at sea, in the air, and left them in other people's cars.

The last straw came last week when, while cooking, I threw them away with the potato peelings.

I found them, stinky and distorted, after searching elbow-deep in the rubbish bin for hours.

It was time for contact lenses.

Today, there are state-of-the-art contact lenses, bi- and even tri-focal, which means you will see like an eagle.

After tests involving dots, squares and patterns, I received prescription contact lenses plus a lesson on how to insert them.

Simple.

The insertion exercise requires you to balance the soft little lens - and it is small - upon your finger, pull your eye apart until the eyeball almost pops out, then insert the thing.

At the optician, I managed, with ease to put in both lenses and walked out feeling free.

No longer did I have to search for spectacles I'd misplaced.

No longer would I have to scratch and scrabble, pull them on and off.

There were problems.

On a few occasions I had difficulty removing a lens when it got lost in my eye socket.

The remedy? To shine a torch upon the offending eye until you find the lens.

It takes a while to get used to contact lenses and includes several return visits to the optician.

And they don't work well if you place the wrong lens in the wrong eye, a common mistake.

Your eyesight is diminished if you manage to turn them inside out, another common fault, and then place them in your eyes.

Worse is to lose a lens - on the floor, in your eyelashes, in your hair.

Searching is stressful. And never, ever, should you do the contact lens bit in the bathroom.

Our sewerage systems are clogged with trillions of mistakenly flushed-away contact lenses.

So I was told by Mr Qukela of the municipal cleansing department when I dropped one down the plughole.

It would, he said, be impossible to retrieve it.

Yesterday, I got it right.

I popped my lenses in and out in two seconds flat and could see like a Cape vulture.

I hadn't realised my face was so pleated, my car so dented, my house so shabby.

Then, this morning, while having breakfast, a tall, handsome man came and sat beside me.

"Hello, Darling?" I said happily thinking it was the first time I'd really seen my husband in focus for years.

Wow.

"I'm Tinus de Jager from DampControl," he said. "Your husband let me in and told me to come through."

Such is life.

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