I almost put rice in my coffee maker. It feels very odd, going through my morning routine without my contact lenses. With a prescription of –3.0 in both eyes, I’m fine around the house, really. But the packs of coffee and rice on the top shelf of my cupboard are dangerously similar. The world is covered by a veil of fog.
“First thing, leave your contact lenses out for a few hours in the morning for a while,” Kim van der Hoeven advised me. I had gone to see her to talk about learning to see clearly without contact lenses or glasses. Van der Hoeven is a vision educator for people who want to improve their eyesight with natural methods. She is convinced you can decrease the strength of your prescription. She herself once wore glasses with an Rx of –7.0 and now has brought it down to –2.0.
Van der Hoeven, a young woman in the Westland region in the southwestern Netherlands, tells me in a down-to-earth way how she reduced the strength of her prescription. As we sit at her kitchen table, she tells how it all began when a friend gave her a magazine article two years ago. “That was the first time I read that you can do things to influence your eyesight,” says Van der Hoeven.
Influence your eyesight? I think about it. It’s so hard to believe no optometrist has ever mentioned it to me. I have been wearing contact lenses and glasses for ten years now, and have never enjoyed it. The glasses slide off my nose and get smudged all the time, and the contacts irritate me and dry out my eyes. Could I stop wearing them?
