<p>Hey...</p>
<p>Considering the fact that I'm almost blind, I'm wondering if hard contact lenses are a good option. Besides the fact that it's uncomfortable, I heard that it can improve your vision? And it's a bit cheaper because you can wear it longer? I'm considering looking into it... where can I find more info? Sorry if this may be a totally ignorant question.</p>
<p>Thanks.</p>
<p>Don't be sorry, your asking a question like everyone else on this forum.
Heres a link to your question- <a href="http://www.allaboutvision.com/contacts/rgps.htm%5B/url%5D">http://www.allaboutvision.com/contacts/rgps.htm</a></p>
<p>Hope this helped!</p>
<p>i wear hard contacts (i'm assuming you mean the really thick ones you wear at night and take off during the day adn they let you have good vision w/o glasses) . have been for a couple years now. be prepared though: THEY HURT LIKE HELL for the first couple times and if you lose one, you're screwed until you can get another one... and if you don't get the right amount of sleep, your vision gets blurry and you gt terrible headaches. as they are so expensive, i would suggest you get laser correction if you are over 18 and your eye doctor gives you the okay. That's what i'll probably get, as hard lenses are actually only suitable for teens - early adulthood.
Its kind of a love/hate relationship with mine cuz sometimes even when i get the right amount of sleep they are still blurry... so definatly consult your optermatrist ( don't know how to spell) first and then talk with your parents about it. its actually quite common to have hard contact lenses from where i come from.
The reason why people say they "improve your vision" is because the hard lenses push your eye (the curve of the eye has changed, hence why people need glasses) back into its regular curve ( which is also why it hurts so much at first!). it does not improve your vision in the long run, as if you do not wear the lense, the eye will settle back into its original curve, but it DOES prevent your eyes from getting worse with the bonus of giving you good vision without wearing glasses. however, if you do choose this option, you will be experiencing extreme sensitivity to sunlight. Hope this helps!! and good luck.</p>
<p>athenegoddess, Can you elaborate how clear you see after wearing the hard contacts during sleep? So if you wake up at the wrong time, you corrupt the whole beneficial process?</p>
<p>Hard contacts really hurt.</p>
<p>I'm severely myopic (-8.0 in both eyes) but decided that it's not really worth it to be tearing up everyday and all the time. Good thing though my eyes stopped getting worse since 7th grade. I only advanced -0.75 in five years...I'm pretty sure that was without the hard contacts since I only wore it for 3 months and decided it was too much to deal with. Your eyes should start settling down around high school.</p>
<p>I had the Paragon CRT system, which is similar to what athenegoddess was talking about. I recently stopped using it and went back to soft contact lenses. With my experience, they were very unreliable. In order for them to have the full effect, you would have to wear them for eight hours ( i rarley got eight hours of sleep). If you rubbed your eyes while you were sleeping, I often moved the contact just a little, so in the morning my vision in one eye was blurry. Wearing contact lenses at night isnt a great idea anyway, you dont let hardly any oxygen in your eye. let me try not to ramble</p>
<p>Pros- Not having to wear contacts during the day, able to go swimming, scuba diving etc without having to worry about lenses falling out</p>
<p>Cons- Vison inconsistent, the day I switched out of the Paragon CRT the doctor said I had about 20/60 vision. At night sometimes I had a hard time seeing.. which made driving scary sometimes. Wearing contacts at night really isnt that good for your eyes (health wise) If you lost/ broke a lens your screwed- you would have to wait for another one to be shipped to you.</p>
<p>Xsam42x : no, its not like that! Sorry i wasn't quite clear on what i meant. The rules for mine are that you have to have at least 8 hrs of sleep, with no more than 12 hrs. However, even if you do get 8 hrs of sleep one night, but only get say, 4 hrs on a regular basis, the 8 hrs will still not improve your vision, your vision will be blurry. But if you have a regular time in which you put them on and take them off, the hard contacts WILL improve your vision significantly. I'm not sure exactly what my vision is when the hard contacts work for me, but i'm pretty sure its almost perfect vision.
But like lcraft60 says, its doesn't take a lot to get inconsistent vision. Stuff that your eye secretes into the lense also affects your vision. Also, at night it is sometimes difficult to see... as the effect of the lense wears off. that's why i'm considering laser surgery when im 18 , even though its ridiculously expensive and my family can't really afford it.. but i can't wear eyeglasses because they give me reallly bad headaches. </p>
<p>and yeah, i lost one of my lenses down the drain once. it was awful. i had terrible headaches for a week until my lense got shipped to me. and then i had to adjust to it all over again... aggghhh! </p>
<p>hope this helps. :)</p>
<p>Thanks for the advice! Any suggestions on which brand is good? Is Synergy okay?</p>
<p>Thanks.</p>
<p>I started hard wearing contacts in 4th grade as part of this CLAMP study with Jeffery Walline at Ohio State. (You can look into it for the more specific results.) Basically, the point of the study was to see if hard contacts would prevent further deterioration of vision. </p>
<p>I started on hard contacts, went to soft, went back to hard, and now I wear soft contacts. They were just such a pain...I have really sensitive eyes so they would bug me ALL the time, and soft ones never do. At least not to the same extent.</p>
<p>Anyway. In the end, it was determined that there wasn't enough data to be conclusive. The kids who wore the hard contacts had their vision progress less than those in the soft, but not enough to be sure that the hard contacts were the cause of it.</p>
<p>But if your vision is as bad as mine (like -8.0 or so...wow Asian) then the hard contacts you sleep in won't help. My optometrist talked to me about it. But I don't know how bad your vision is. Most people think theirs is really bad, when in fact, it's not. There's a limit to the correcting it can do. I think if your prescription is worse than -4.0 or something (don't trust me on this!) then it won't work.</p>
<p>...I wouldn't get hard contacts, personally. They're a pain and a half.</p>
<p>mine were Contex.</p>