The lens in my dominant right eye is toast. Easy to put a new lens in. Hard to figure out which lens to put in. Bionic lens technology is awesome, but it's not connected to the eye anymore and sort of floats in there. So where it focuses, is where it focuses. Period. Depth of field is relatively narrow. So where do you set the focus distance?
Casually you might think 20/20 would be great, but it's not so great if you think about it. You can see perfectly far. But across the room, across a table, or to a book in your hand it'll be blurry. I'm also nearsighted so the brain doesn't like one eye focused far and the other near. And optically, if the differential is too big, you can't even correct it with glasses and it'll split your personalty.
Spent a week thinking about this one. In the end, got practical, and squeezed a bit into the unknown for the solution. The right dominant eye I wanted focused at arm's length. So I can read a menu or tie on a reasonable sized salt water fly. The left eye, being also very nearsighted needs to be adjusted as well, so that focus distance was set at someone across a table, or a golf ball at my feet. That put the focus distance of the two eyes about 1 diopter apart which is the max the optics can correct properly. It meant that I can actually find my glasses when I lose them in the house. Or thread a fish hook to stay alive on an island (though I won't see the ship passing by in the distance, I can eatfish to stay alive long enough to figure out how to make fire). Practically speaking, I can spend most of the time without glasses, and only need them for far and very close.
Which means getting the left eye fixed while at it even though it hadn't yet completely become a white marble. Oh, and it is illegal to get both eyes fixed at the same time in the United States (go figure). On the bright side, shopping for new sunnies, dive masks and reading glasses just once. And dealing with the healing issues now, when I'm younger, than later.
It's never as simple as it seems. But I'll be good for another 50,000 miles.
(via Jiro on iPhone)