Midday fogging with scleral lenses and how to help fix it

​I have worn glasses since my math teacher noticed my inability to see the board in Algebra class in the 7th grade. It turned out that I had bad, irregular astigmatism as well as near sightedness—and it has only gotten worse since—with a minor eye-injury in my early adulthood, chronically dry eyes, and steadily deteriorating vision at distance. As a professional writer by trade, lacking the medical background or academic acumen for understanding my vision-related options, glasses had simply become a given facet of my life, and one that I’d never thought to question before. For me, it had always been a choice between glasses and eye-surgery, shutting me off from the significant benefits of lensing options. Only recently, some thirty years after my first pair of glasses, have I finally gotten around to trying scleral contact lenses—amazed now by the freedom they offer, and baffled that it took me so long to give them a try. 

But with such added freedoms arise new difficulties. I seem to be one of the 30% of scleral lens wearers whose sharp vision starts to decrease as the day goes on—manifesting as a cloudy haze in my vision, particularly in the left eye, after a few hours of wear. This phenomenon, called “midday fogging,” is rarely so marked that it affects or impedes my ability to read and write, but it is less than ideal for my sense of newfound freedom with an unadorned face, and has required myriad attempted solutions during my lunch hour at the office.
 
Eye doctors suspect that midday fogging is caused by microscopic debris that accumulates between my scleral lens and my cornea, potentially exacerbated by low viscosity of my tears. After consulting my eye care provider and a little experimentation, I’ve finally found a quick-fix cocktail that works for me.
 
I now wash my lenses with a mix of high-viscosity artificial tears and sterile saline that works to battle dry-eye symptoms and reduce debris. It’s taken a little trial and error to find what fits my particular eye chemistry, but now I’m able to wear my scleral lenses uninterrupted for the whole workday, and my freedom from glasses is the best it’s been since grade school.  
 
Learn more
 
Scleral Contact Lens - Managing the Midday Fog, by Jessica H Mathew, OD, PhD: http://bit.ly/2rRgvjN
 
Midday Fogging with Scleral Lenses, National Keratoconus Foundation: https://www.nkcf.org/midday-fogging/