Thank you, Leonardo da Vinci and René Descartes for your foresights. Adolf Gaston Eugen Fick, your research has changed the lives of millions, including that of an extremely grateful yours truly. After years of living without lateral vision, going through God only knows how many pairs of specs, black eyes because of broken glasses, fogged up lenses and regular spectacle maintenance, my optician finally, finally told me I was ready for contact lenses.
Ecstatic, jumping around like I had triple- springiness- enforced springs attached to my soles, I rushed through the orientation, impatient to try on my very first pair. After trying and failing to stick them onto my corneas hundreds of times (or at least that’s what it felt like), I managed. After rolling my eyeballs around a few times, to make sure the lenses were in their correct places and blinking a lot, I ultimately managed to see, using my lateral vision- something that I had been incapable of making use of for six years, because I was, and still am, blinder than a bat sans any of its sensory organs when I’m not wearing any visual aids. And as my visual aids consisted solely of spectacles for six years, I had forgotten what the phrase ‘from the corner of one’s eye’ meant.
It’s only when I got over the initial excitement of being able to run from a cold room to a hot room without my glasses getting fogged up, and being able to play in the rain without getting drops of water on the lenses that I began grasping the wonder of the miracle that is a contact lens. It’s basically just a piece of plastic. But it grants us the power to see clearly, in an amazingly hassle-free way. You insert it in your eye, blink, et voila! You can see everything (provided, of course, that you are wearing the correct power)!
They are thin, compact, disposable, extremely convenient, and require practically no maintenance, yet after a while, wearers start taking lenses for granted, and fail to marvel at the phenomenal power of these mind-blowing bits of plastic. They aren’t things one can simply accept as part of life! The beauty of being able to see and appreciate the world is an amazing blessing everyone reading this piece has been endowed with, with a few using visual aids like me in order to achieve this. The latter, hopefully, can understand my awe, and my eternal gratefulness to those geniuses who spent a large part of their lives designing something that has gone a long way in revolutionizing the way people with distorted vision (at least those fortunate enough to have access to lenses) view the world.