A Stig What?

Prior to having laser eye surgery, I had a pretty severe case of astigmatism in both eyes. When I was in high school this kept me from being able to wear soft contacts, thus forcing me into the era of big glasses.

For those who aren't sure what astigmatism is, this blurb from wikipedia probably won't help :-)

Astigmatism is an optical defect, whereby vision is blurred due to irregular curvature of the cornea or lens. In corneal astigmatism, the cornea is ellipsoidal (like an egg) rather than spherical, which reduces the cornea's ability to focus light. In lenticular astigmatism, the curvature of the crystalline lens is not even, resulting in scattering rather than focusing of light on the retina. When light strikes the retina at multiple points, the result is blurred vision.

The refractive error of the astigmatic eye stems from a difference in degree of refraction in different meridians (i.e., the eye has different focal points in different planes.) For example, the image may be clearly focused on the retina in the horizontal (sagittal) plane, but not in front of the retina in the vertical (tangential) plane. Astigmatism causes difficulties in seeing fine detail, and in some cases vertical lines (e.g., walls) may appear to the patient to be leaning over. The effects of astigmatism of the eye can often be corrected by prosthetic lenses with a cylindrical lens (i.e. a lens that has different radii of curvature in different planes), contact lenses, or refractive surgery.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astigmatism_%28eye%29