What in the heck is a Neurolens? Well, I will tell you. Oh, and this is a friendly reminder to schedule your annual eye exam at your local optometrist today!
Let’s start with my bias/background. So I have always had good healthcare growing up, my dad worked very hard to make that a reality. I am in a partnership and we have healthcare together. Vision, Dental, and Health. It is an expensive thing to have, I have learned as an adult. The last couple of years has seen a lot happening on the health front, and in dealing with IVF stuff it was easy to forget about Vision. The last time I had my eyes checked, was at least 3 years ago. Well, my partner mentioned they wanted to cut VSP as we were not using it much and told me to get my eyes checked.
I wear glasses and boy do I look good in them. (Think sexy librarian). I believe last time I got the prescription done at Brea Optometry and processed the glasses at Costco Vision Center. And I have not been keeping up with my annual eye exam. I use my glasses for eye strain from migraines, night driving, and computer/reading stuff.
So I got my eyes checked out, this is a weird thing to notice but in getting my exam done-I used all the machines in the testing room! I honestly thought that my left eye was worse than my right, and it turns out I had that backwards. My optometrist mentioned a new kind of lens that neurologist paired up with optometrist to make: Neurolens. First, why would I (or anyone suffering with migraines/headaches), need this? My eyes want to veer left/right vs being straight ahead, my mind forces them straight ahead. When my eyes overwork trying to be “normal” the strain is felt along the jaw or neck muscles, because in the human body-everything is connected. I myself usually have a small to large pain scale migraine daily-I suffer from Chronic Non-Nauseating Migraines- since I was in my preteen years.
The Neurolens will bring the information to my eyes, compared to my eyes working to find the information I am looking at. Less strain, in theory, is less pain. Less pain, well, that is probably self explanatory. While I have lived with pain long enough to do so with professional ease, a bit of a break would be heavenly. It’s probably a strange thing to be afraid of, but I do a lot and deal with a lot of pain while I am it-and worry that I won’t be able to finish my duties. Or that I will push myself too far and I won’t be able to drive the one time a month I can’t drive through the pain to take myself to urgent care.
Anyways, so I bit the expensive bullet and decided to try blue light (good for glare from computers), transition, and neurolens glasses for just under $1000. My partner is somewhat ok with this and wants me to save this for tax purposes later when we do our 2023 taxes in 2024. The Neurolens was 80% of the cost of the whole glasses, my optometrist said that only about 1,000 offices offer it-which just in OC alone there could be 1,000 optometry offices. The number seems high, but not in the bigger picture.
I gotta tell you though, I feel hella bad about it. I will get my money back and more in daily use-especially if I am not getting new glasses every year but like every couple of years. But man, I feel bad. Like to a certain degree, it is not my fault my mom did a spinal tap on me when I was a preteen and triggered migraines that run on her side of the family. But damn if I don’t want someone else to pay the price for someone elses mistakes. But not much I can do about that.
Anyways, it will be less than 2 weeks before my new glasses get in. In the meantime, let’s play the research game! Here is the site so you can follow along in the research:
https://www.neurolens.com/
93% Sucess Rate, according to Google. Those are some decent odds, in the past couple of years alone I have taken on things with less likely odds than that. Anyone here who prefers videos, Youtube has quite a few videos.
I got my glasses in, they came in a sooner than I thought they would. I put them on, and man I am telling you I could feel the changing location of strain in my eye/forehead area right away. My sense of direction, or I should say distance, and my sense of balance was immediately altered. How big a room looked before, and how small after....I was a little bit scared to be honest. Some of the thoughts I had were: are my eyes this bad? did I always have a dizzy issue? Oh, that was not a good rabbit hole. They told me to wear them in general for a couple of days to break them in.
Day 1 of breaking them was a little rough. I am hoping its short term pain for long term positive gain. Day 2 was a little bit better, so some hope there. Day 2 is much better than Day 1, and Day 3 is better.
“3 Days For The World To Turn Right Side Up Again” (There is a great Bones episode that shows this. More info here: https://gizmodo.com/does-your-brain-really-have-the-power-to-see-the-world-5905180)
Aside from the “breaking the shoe in” phase, how are things? Having had mental pain for, most of the last 20 years-I have learned to live with the weight of the mental pain. There is a weight to it, while that doesn't seem to make much sense. Since getting the glasses, there is less mental pain weight and its really weird to get used to. It is a good thing so far, but it is also longer than I would of thought for the rewiring process. My “idea” of what is close and what is not, and my eyes being reworked is almost constant? It so far is different, more good than bad. Shocking, like really-what the heck is happening by me just wearing glasses? Like I should understand this because I have lived with it and researched it, but as I experience it-it confounds me.
