I've always had bad eyes, I started wearing glasses when I was about 5 or so. During HS I started wearing contacts in order to play football, I couldn't fit glasses under my helmet and I am completely blind without them! In those days I wore soft contacts, very comfortable but they had a hard time staying oriented on my eye correctly, toric lenses correct astigmatism by staying oriented using small weights on the bottom of the lens.
I got away from contacts for a while due to money issues, I've been wearing glasses exclusively for about 5 years now. I've been wanting to return to contacts and just recently decided to take the plunge. Unfortunately my eyes have worsened over the years, they're now so bad that soft contacts aren't made for such a strong prescription (-13 diopters of near sightedness correction + astigmatism correction) so i had to go to rigid gas permeable contacts...hard contacts! They've been difficult to adjust to, they're much smaller than soft contacts and initially you feel like you always have eyelashes in your eyes!
Initially my opthomologist said I had to get custom contact lenses...I went for that appt and after paying $150 for the consultation I was told that my new lenses would be $900!!! wow. I found another place that was able to fit me in standard hard lenses but even then it was $320 just for the contacts...plust another $100 consultation.
I've had them for a couple of weeks now and I am adjusting to them, there are positives...they seem to stay oriented correctly much more so than the soft lenses ever did. The other great thing I'm happy with is how BIG everything seems now! I'd been so used to glasses that I'd forgotten how poorly I see in them!
I've had no problems with them popping out until the other day while flying, I'm sure it was just because I had let them get too dry in the wind...I'm putting a bottle of eyedrops in my field box for flying!