[An ex-girlfriend, after reading through too much of this site for either of our good, once observed that my life appeared to be composed largely of recurring patterns, the central one being: “sleeplessness, illness, then the avid (drunken) pursuit of women.”

As they say, one good turn deserves another.]

Having spent much of my life in photography (and now, in film), I’m obsessive about visual clarity. Which is why, despite my prescription being repeatedly described as ‘totally pansy’ by those who really need their glasses, I wear mine all the time. I have since getting my first pair, in eleventh grade – bought, initially, to help me read the board from my customary back row seat, rather than force a move to the front.

To be accurate, throughout most of college, I actually rotated contacts in about half the time. But, since moving to New York some five years back, I’ve slowly drifted away from rotating. Perhaps it’s my hectic bags-below-the-eyes-inducing schedule, the irritating grit of city air, or a desire for the faux-intellectual look a good pair of spectacles provides. Whatever the reason, my contacts have fallen by the wayside.

I realized as much last week, and have since been trying to work contacts back into regular use. And, by and large, it’s been an excellent change. But there’s one major downside: I awake constantly throughout the night, suddenly convinced I forgot to remove the contacts before going to sleep, leaving me hours deep in irreparable corneal damage.

I should, at this point, admit that I’m a complete and total hypochondriac, the combination of medical knowledge, vivid imagination, and general neurosis conspiring to convince me – often aided by Google symptom-searching (“headache and slight fever? I knew it! Malaria!!!”) – that my world is coming to a slow and painful end.

This is particularly true with contacts, due to a booklet I once read at the optometrist’s office on the potential dangers of sleeping in contacts not approved for ‘continuous use’. In pictures and gory written detail, the booklet laid out the risks of ‘serious eye infection’ and ‘abnormal corneal blood vessel growth’. It is the second that most plagues my imagination, as the line between vodka-induced ‘harmlessly bloodshot’ and slept-in-contacts-induced ‘abnormal blood vessel growth’ is a distinction admittedly beyond my abilities of accurate self-diagnosis.

Fortunately, unlike in the case of goiter, femoral hernia, or any of the other imagined afflictions I woefully cast upon myself, shaking slept-in-contacts fears should be rather easy – if I’m not actually wearing the contacts as I sleep, I’m fine. Less fortunately, my contacts-less vision is good enough that, in a darkened room without any distant objects to stare at, I’m often unable to decide whether I am, in fact, wearing them or not, at least without repeatedly poking myself in the eyeball.

Because my contacts are one day disposables, I’ve now stumbled upon a workable solution: after removing them, I leave them on my night-stand. Waking up at three in the morning, then, I’m able to simply look over at the small silicone discs slowly drying out to relieve my worries and put myself back to sleep. Gross perhaps, but certainly better than abnormal corneal blood vessel growth. Or, at least, better than fears of it. As is the case with most of my hypochondriacal self-diagnoses, I happily doubt I’ll ever have the chance to experience the real thing.