Anyone use hard contact lenses while riding?

[kaylacandelmo]

Hey all!

I am not new to the contact lens world. I’ve had bad vision since early childhood. Over the past year or so I’ve had significant vision decline and recently found out I am in the early stages of Keratoconus (my cornea is pretty much stretching out and warped on my eyeball). My eye doctor has suggested I get hard contact lenses that are designed to push my cornea back onto my eye and hopefully stop any further damage to my cornea… the thing I am nervous about is that everything I have read says that the GP lenses are smaller and thus easier to dislodge and also because they move with the eye when you blink it’s easier for dust and debris to get under the lens and cause irritation/abrasion to the cornea (which is already my problem).

Does anyone compete/ride/manage a horse farm with hard contact lenses? Thanks for any insight!

[Hilary]

I used to use the Boston lenses - rigid, gas-permeable. Oh did they give me perfect, clear vision! But when something gets under them it really hurts. Fortunately, they are really easy to get in/out of your eye, so they were easily taken out and rinsed off. I only had one time where I had to do it in the warm up ring by spitting on it.

The other thing that happens with these lenses that doesn’t happen with soft is that it is possible to hit the side of your eye just right and the lens pops out. That only happened once on XC - and it was raining so hard you couldn’t see much anyway. This happened probably 5 times in the 20 years I wore them. The bigger problem is getting something under them because it does hurt and you have to stop and rinse them.

So there are some drawbacks but I loved them and was really disappointed when my eyes stopped tolerating them and I had to switch to soft lenses. The times you needed to stop and rinse were minimal.

[Saskatoonian]

oh sure - I wore them for ages - over a decade, I’m sure. They’re so much less complicated than soft lenses. For one thing, you can rinse them in anything. Worst case you stick it in your mouth and back in your eye. (Oh yes I did - many times - I worked in a barn.)

[ridexc]

Rigid gas-perm wearer (Boston lens) for over 40 years. I have a -15 prescription, so softs really aren’t an option. For durability and ease of care, you can’t beat them. As others have said, getting a schmutz under your lens hurts like a sonofabitch, and sometimes you do have to stop and either pop the lens out and rinse it, or just claw at your eye with a tissue for a bit :-). One other caveat: they have to be placed in your eye more accurately than a soft lens, as in, if you miss the cornea and get the lens on the white of your eye, it takes some rather painful maneuvering to get it where it’s supposed to be! That mostly happens when you’re new to them.

I have very rarely lost one gratuitously. The last time I can remember having one pop out of my eye was when I managed to whack myself in the eyeball with a girth billet while tightening my girth. Do emphasize to your ophthamologist that you need the fit to be really good, though. Because, barn.

[linquest]

I used hard lenses for about 15 years before switching to soft about 5 years ago. I had similar experience with Boston RGPs as Hilary. I switched after I ran into a tree branch while riding and one of my hard lenses popped off (though I haven’t tried to replicate that event w/soft lenses Soft lenses are definitely more comfortable–there were times when I would get something under the hard lens, and then my eye would be too irritated to put the lens back in for the rest of the day. However, hard lenses definitely seemed to stabilize my vision much better–my rx didn’t change for 6 years with my first pair of contacts, and now there’s definite changes every year with soft. There’s a definite trade-off.