Contact lens — Blog

Ocular health

Now that we're largely out of the COVID pandemic, I'm trying to get caught up with my health checkups. A few weeks back I went to Kaiser for a physical. This past Friday I got an eye exam - the first time since 2018. It is well overdue to update my contact lens prescription. No more buying sets from Canada, which is what I've been doing for the past few years.

Why? Because there's a stupid rule here in the States that prevents people from buying contact lens without a valid prescription. Typically, prescriptions are good for one calendar year. Past that point and you'll have to go see your optometrist again to renew. Seems more like racketeering to me, rather than protecting consumers from sticking the wrong thing into their eyeballs.

In addition to renewing my contact lens prescription (my eyes have only worsen slightly in the past four years), I also fitted new glasses. By my recollection it's been over eight years since I got my current pair of frames. Somehow it has lasted me until now. Obviously because I only use them for the few hours at home when I'm not wearing contacts. Never outside.

However, due to the severely outdated prescription, I can no longer see the TV clearly whilst wearing glasses. Sometimes during weekend mornings I prefer to watch TV or play videos games without first putting on contact lenses. With the old glasses I would have to sit closer that I would prefer. This new pair will be an absolute revelation. I'll finally experience (corrected) 20/20 vision again, something not even my contacts correct to.

Buying contact lenses shouldn't be this hard

America: land of the free, home of ardent individualism, and yet why on earth are we unable to buy contact lenses without a valid prescription? Do the rule-makers at the FDA think that I would willingly put an incorrect lens into my eyeballs? I’m really not sure what the prescription requirement is suppose to accomplish (no such laws exist anywhere else in the developed world that I could find), other than make the process of procuring contacts more difficult than necessary.

This wouldn’t be a problem if my insurance carrier covered yearly contact lens exams - mine only pays for one biyearly. Since prescriptions are only valid for one year, it puts me in a sort of limbo situation during the second year. What I usually do is right before the prescription expires, I reorder a large enough amount to cover me until the next exam that my insurance will cover. In years past, I’ve even gone as far as buying a two-year supply, just to avoid going in to see the optometrist.

Because the fact is, my prescription has not change at all for the past half decade, and given the option I much prefer to keep ordering the same contacts in perpetuity until that point when I can physical see a deterioration. As the cliche goes, time is money, and heading to the eye doctor requires a few hours that I would rather allocate towards something more important (like writing on this blog, haha.) It’s unfortunate then the laws in America is so strict; I mean, how and why exactly does an eye prescription expire anyways?

Nevertheless, the problem of not being able to order lenses online without a non-expired prescription became acute for me a few weeks back. During the procedure of switching to a new pair of lenses, I realized my reserve supply of contacts was not going to last me until the next eye exam. Due to health and sanitation reasons, I was adamant in not stretching the biweekly replacement cycle, so that meant I had to find a way to order contact lenses pseudo illegally.

Thanks to wonders of international commerce, it turns out shops in countries that don’t have the draconian restriction can and are willing to ship lenses to the United States. For sure there’s a comparative premium over the prices at online shops here in the States, but that’s a delta I must pay this time because otherwise I will run out of contact lenses. I placed an order with a Vancouver based company called Fresh Lens, and the product arrived yesterday correctly and as advertised.

A small crisis averted, I would say.