Why have they switched to Vision Express? I thought they used to always go to Specsavers. Can they not afford the post-visit cookie monsters any more? Or is it since they accused them of being incompetent?
They've a child with a complex eye problem. I have a mild lazy eye myself and my son has a much more severe one. You have to go to a proper independent Optometrist. Which are harder and harder to find and yes cost a lot more than bloody supermarket reading glass factories like VE & Specsavers. But it's essential.
The lenses we require are a very special grind called Toric lenses. They're precision ground in select lens factorties. For example in Australia, a country of 28 million people with 35,000 square kms of coastal settlement alone, not accounting for the interior regions, there are two places that do it. Both on the East Coast. One in Brisbane and one in Melbourne. The wait for lenses after the eye test & frame selection can often be 2-3 weeks.
Only one time I chose to go to one of those discount optical supermarkets because they had so many frames so much cheaper than my usual optometrist. Big mistake. i knew as soon as I got the new glasses on at the fitting. I felt like I had a middle ear inection. The floor wasn't where it appeared to be when I put my foot out to walk. Doors & objects on tables were offset to where my hand had gone to open them. Stairs looked like smooth slides.
I told them when they were ftting them and they gave me a line of bullshit about how it was because the prescription was stronger, the frames larger than my last pair and I would adjust to the wider peripheral vision and stronger prescription "In a week or two."
Bolocks. Withn two days I had a blind migraine that would not go away, was so dizzy I was nauseous. I couldn't read a bus number from half a block away. I was to all intents & purposes legally blind. I put on my old glasses and took the walk of shame back to my proper optometrist.
They'd got those precision ground lenses back & put them in the frames at the wrong rotation. And not put on the polarising coating I'd paid so much extra money for either. That bit they just flat out cheated me on. But the rotation thing was the real issue. It had sent my astigmatism into overdrive. Looking at a monochrome striped shirt was almost hallucingenic the lines ran together and waved about so much.
Jace doesn't need two magnifying glasses in a frame. He requires specilaised lenses, prescribed and fitted by a skilled optomegtrist. It's a unique prescription for each eye and no two people's visual requirements will be anything alike. Unlike reading glasses for short sighted people. In fact we are long sighted, which is much more difficvult to correct with lenses. And we all have a severe astigmatism.
The lenses and the degree to which they are rotated has to be exact to compensate for the light messages which his eyes do not send to the visual cortex of his brain. That's why his turn in the eye is so much more evident when he is not wearing his glasses. It's why his eyes are more unevenly sized when he is tired or when they have him sat in front of a screen for
bleeping hours.
For all that they carry on about the Clevah Boi and throw tatty gifts at him on the daily, they are dooming him to a lifetime of increasingly poor vision, lack of fine motor skills, poor co-ordination and chronic migraine by making the optometrical version of TEMU their provider of choice.
