Having bad eyesight is kind of expensive!

It's been nearly six years of since I got my last check up at an eye doctor and six years since I got a new pair of glasses, and all of it was done under the care of my mother's benefits at the time. So I couldn't tell you how expensive it was to do all the way back then, but I had a vague idea it wasn't terribly cheap to do.

Which is what led to me spending something around two months hemming and hawing over whether I need to update my prescription and my glasses.

But six years is too long between check ups on my eyes -- three times too long in fact -- and with the possibility of getting behind a wheel on the horizon and another bloody test for my new driver's license on the horizon, it had come to reason that I had put off the process for too long.

So I went to the eye doctor and then got not one pair of glasses, but two new pairs of glasses. An heir and a spare so to speak.

Thank God for my work benefits, because swallowing the full costs of these items would have hurt. Having bad eyesight can get really expensive.

How expensive? Even after shopping around for preferred prices in both desired frames and a check-up (both of which saw me land at a little boutique near where I worked) the grand total amount came to $364 dollars all told, and that's with me being extremely cheap about it! I've seen the costs being twice as high as what I paid out.

How cheap was I with this? Well, I bought economic frames, largely because they were on a two-for-one special that also did not see me go for a pair of designer frames. It also excludes the cost of contacts, which I've been waffling on only because I don't see too many occasions coming up where I'll be needing them. So there's that.

I was lucky however, in that I did have the option to shop around and find a place that doesn't charge the exorbitant prices that the main retailers did. It also helps that due to the shape of my face and the extremely low bridge of my nose, my frame size selection is extremely limited (I can't go for large frame glasses because my cheekbones would actually jut against my lens!) and generally kept me away from the designer stuff. So what I saved on the frames therefore mostly went towards my lenses.

And I have benefits.

The benefits will swallow about half to a bit more than half of the costs at least so I will be getting paid back the money I've already put into it up front at least. But ultimately, it is pretty unbelievable how something that is more or less a necessity for the poorly visioned really comes at such a cost all the same.

It also makes me ask how isn't it at least partially subsidized by the universal healthcare system, although for all I know, it might just be and the prices we pay are the subsidized pricing. Which makes the whole cost even more alarming.