I buy glasses in high-impact, high-index poly (and Transitions? for the last few years - it's nice not having to keep track of a second pair of sunglasses.)
I still wear contacts for formals, paintball/airsoft, and the like - but glasses are easier for me to deal with on a daily basis (I wore contacts for ~10 years before, and intermittently now.)
First and foremost - take this test. Wash your hands thoroughly, then hold your eyelid open with one hand and gently touch your eyeball with the other. You are allowed to wet your fingertip with any eye drop you like, so long as it's just a moisturiser. If you can't do that, don't bother getting contacts.
It's also going to take you 2-4 weeks to get used to wearing them all day, going up incrementally (I don't suggest doing it all at once.) You will need to clean them thoroughly, and you will need to disinfect them about once a week or so (they can pick up crud, which can give you styes.)
I've had good luck with Accuvue and Bausch & Lomb, and for solutions I'll get AOSept, Opti, or B&L. Don't scrimp here - you only get one pair of eyes, and they haven't come up with suitable replacements yet (and when they do, you can be first after me to get them. I'd like mine with starlight/IR night vision, rangefinding, and macro focus, please.)
Yes, when wearing spectacles and dealing with small flying bits of nasty (like cutting/grinding metal...) I'll still wear a full face shield. Contacts get the "Fearless Fly" goggles, and I keep both handy. However, the Fearless Flys over specs tend to fog up, and I like to avoid that (since it happens at the worst possible time...)
You'll probably find that you wash your hands a good deal more often - I still tend to wash mine upwards of a dozen times a day, not including trips to the head.
Suggest you get wraparounds if you get contacts. Are you nearsighted or farsighted? Astigmatic? From what you were saying, it sounds as though you're getting farsighted, but it helps to be sure. I ask because there are a few "spots" in the range of diopter/correction factors that tend to focus UV or IR more tightly on your retina, and that should be accounted for when you get your shades (IR isn't so bad - you'll feel a "hot spot" on the back of your eye, believe it or not. UV you won't feel until it burns a blind spot in the back of your eye, from what I've been told. Polycarbonate is nearly always impregnated with a UV blocker. Don't get cheap shades...)
If you get "soft" lenses (which I highly suggest - but I don't think they even make "hard" lenses anymore...) get used to what they're supposed to look like before you put them in. Soft lenses can turn themselves inside out when you're cleaning them, and putting them on inside out can actually make them pop off the front of your eyeball. Once you know what to look for, it's easier to spot. If the lense is inside out, you'll usually see a small "lip" at the edge of the "bowl" of the lense - if that happens, dampen your fingers with saline and gently press it the other way out.
I ask if you're astigmatic for one reason - if your astigmatism is bad enough, you'll need a Toric lense (to correct for the astigmatism) which costs about twice as much. They're made with the cylinder correction you'd have ground into your spectacles, and the lenses are actually weighted to align themselves properly on your eyeball (feels & looks weird, the first few times it happens.) These are the lenses I now need - yet another reason I don't wear contacts so much anymore.
Due to changes in prescription and shape of your eyeball, contact lense prescriptions are labelled "Do Not Dispense After One Year." Annual eye exams become very important! Do not wear a pair of lenses for more than one year...
If you get disposables, you can do away with the weekly disinfecting and deep cleaning, but you'll still want to remove them nightly and clean them gently two-three times a week.
Probably the biggest thing that can happen if you sleep with them in is that you "lose" the lense during REM sleep - your eyes will move a couple of times, the lense will not, and it will shift around to the side, top, or bottom of your eyeball. This won't hurt anything - it's happened to me. Soft lenses are mostly water, and they will break down over time and dissolve right out of your eye socket. Problem solved.
Handling while cleaning - if you have a lot of callus on your hands (like me...) be very careful while cleaning a soft lense. I've torn a few, simply because they'd catch on callus. I ended up cleaning them with my ring fingers, due to the fact that there isn't as much callus on them as there is on my index and middle fingers.
Figure on wrecking a pair during your first year - part of the learning curve. Fortunately, contacts have gotten much more inexpensive over the years than they were 15 years ago!
