Pain when wearing new set of Ortho-K lens
For some context, I’m 20 years old (-6.75 in the right eye and -5.50 in the left eye) and have been wearing Ortho-K since I was 7. All these years, I’ve never had a major problems with them, I could quite literally go hours wearing them at night and read on my phone or do homework. No dryness or pain. However, I got my lens renewed two years ago and since the first time wearing them, they suddenly get dry really fast. I could only go 10-20 minutes max before they started hurting and I sometimes woke up with them hurting due to dryness. The pain was mostly mild and didn’t happen way too often. I just started going to sleep right after putting them on, which is what you’re suppose to do anyway.
The problem is when I got my lens renewed again about four months ago. They hurt even more and after literal minutes of putting them in. I can’t go to the restroom or get a glass of water without them hurting anymore. I wake up literally every morning with my eyes hurting, and if I wake up in the middle of the night randomly, they hurt. It started affecting my sleep and I can’t keep them in for longer than maybe 6 hours. Eyedrops don’t help either, I usually use Refresh and Blink & Clean, they help for maybe 15 seconds and then it’s back to pain. If I use them more than 1-2 times, they don’t help with the pain at all. My optometrist told me to switch to gel eye drops because my eyes were too dry, but Systane made my eyes sting. I’m also not sure why the pain started exactly when I switched to my second most recent pair.
I told my optometrist all this and he told me he’d readjust the lens, which was about a month ago. Nothing changed and the pain was still daily, so he told me he would make a different set of Ortho-K lens with a new technique. I tried them today and they hurt even worse. I had to keep them in for 30 minutes today to take scans and they burned so badly after 15 minutes. I literally had tears dripping down my cheek during my eye scan. When the optometrist came in, the first thing he says is the lens worked great and my vision is already partly fixed just from 30 minutes. I thought you made a new pair of lens for me to fix the dryness/pain though?? He told me to keep wearing those pair and that he guarantees they’ll stop hurting after the first week because they’re stronger than my other pairs. My eyes hurt (not as bad as when wearing them, but some stinging) for another 20 minutes after taking out the Ortho-K lens.
Has anyone else experienced something similar or have any advice? I’m starting to think Ortho-K just doesn’t work for me anymore for whatever reason, but soft contacts dry out my eyes and glasses strain my eyes and my perception gets kind of wonky with them, which is why I used to prefer Ortho-K.