macular degeneration, macular, diagnosis Walmart Optical Saves the Day! – My Macular Degeneration Journey/Journal

Walmart Optical Saves the Day!

I broke my glasses last evening. I broke off one of the side pieces, called ‘temples’ believe it or not. Learn something new every day.

This became a bit of a concern because I do not have backup specs anymore. When I got these my optometrist wanted me to have every possible modification I could get. My lenses are purple and guard against ultraviolet light. They are glare and scratch resistant. They darken in the sun. These lenses do everything except march and whistle Dixie and they cost a small fortune. I cannot see me having an equally amazing and expensive pair sitting in a drawer in reserve.

I went to classes this morning and got on the trail of emergency eyeglass frame replacement this afternoon. Fortunately, I hit pay dirt quickly. Walmart’s optical department will do on-the-spot eyeglass frame replacements. Yippee!

Then came the fun of trying to match a frame to my lenses. It is so much more complicated than going in and pointing to the one you want. My lenses had been ground to be the size and shape of my original frames. That meant we had to hunt to find frames with a similar sized opening. Then we had to worry about the thickness of the lenses. Some frames would be too flimsy to take a thick, heavy lens.

There are other things that probably should have been considered and were not. Remember when you got new glasses and they put marks on the lenses? They were taking centering data.

Centering data appears to have two major parts to it. One is pupillary distance. That is the space between your pupils. This is much more important to know when your have stronger prescriptions. Knowing your pupillary distance and taking it into account when fitting glasses increases your chances of having the maximum correction from the lenses, called the focal point, right where it is needed, in front of your pupils. If they are not matched up, image shift and blurriness can occur.

The other one is the vertical fitting height. Once again this is important for making sure your pupil is lined up with the focal point of the lens.

In a perfect world, the girl at Walmart would have done the centering measurements for my replacement frames. But also in a perfect world my original frames would not have decided to fall to pieces late on a Friday evening! And/or the hospital glasses shop where I purchased them would have been open on a Saturday. You get the idea: this is not a perfect world! I was happy to get reasonably priced replacement frames within an hour’s time on a Saturday.

And you know what amazed the Walmart girl? The new frames actually look good on me! Score and bonus score!

Thanks, Walmart Optical for saving my day!

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