Hi Mary,

Most people do NOT have trouble wearing multi-focal lenses this way. The stronger eye works fine for distance (or your primary correction) and the weaker eye takes care of the reading correction.

I wore mono vision contacts for over a year and seemed to have trouble with them. Now note the reason why:

Turns out that in bright light, my pupils close to tiny, tiny dots. Therefore, I was not getting very good benefit from either lense. So, what we ended up doing instead with me was, she gave me a lense that had the same script in both eyes, a multi-focal lense that has two strengths which enables me to see at distance to drive, still work fairly close up like with a computer screen, but for reading and really close-up stuff, I still have to wear readers.

The mono vision method will take you about a week or so to get used to. That's on top of learning to wear contacts if you haven't worn them before. If you haven't worn contacts before, try not to over extend your wearing schedule. I would also make another suggestion. I (and you) live in extremely dry climates. I wear a product called ProClear Multifocal by Coopervision. They are not the cheapest but they are very high in water content. They are very good in dry climates. Just a suggestion. I've had two optometrists suggest them. If money is an issue, there are a lot of cheaper ones.

Hope this helps.