Life was going extremely well for Ginny and I. We had met at university and we married soon after graduation. Ginny had trained to be a nurse, and I was the IT manager for a large trucking company. We had not realized that Ginny would end up being pregnant almost immediately after we were married, but now we had recently celebrated our 8th anniversary and we already had two children. Abigail had now turned 7 and Mitchell was 5. Everything was really quite perfect with our lives. And then things changed in a flash of bent steel. It had been a beautiful Sunday afternoon at the beach, and we were returning home when traffic slowed to a stop in front of me. I braked sharply and managed to come to a stop just a couple of feet before hitting the car in front of me. But we were not that fortunate because the car behind me smashed into our rear. Even with me still holding the brakes on our car was shoved into the one on front of us and we were all screaming. The air bags exploded, trapping Ginny and I in the front seat. I could hear the kids screaming in the rear, and I managed to deflate my air bag with my pocketknife, but the driver’s door was jammed shut. It seemed to take forever, before emergency personnel managed to extract us from the car and we were all taken by ambulances to the very hospital where Ginny worked. Ginny and I were bruised and sore from the airbags. Mitch was strapped in his car seat and was cut and bruised but no bones were broken. The side of the car where Abby was sitting had taken the brunt of the crash and Abby had been hit pretty hard. Her arm was broken and she had swelling of the brain. They had to drill some holes to take the pressure off and the doctors were considering removing the top of her skull to allow her brain to heal and shrink back to its normal size. Fortunately, the bleeding stopped, and the holes they drilled were enough to allow the blood and fluids to drain and ease most of the pressure. The doctors kept Abbey in a drug induced coma for almost a month before they gradually brought her back to consciousness. It took another week or so before Abbey was awake enough to recognize our voices and even more time before she was able to have the ventilator tubes that fed her lungs with oxygen removed. Her voice was very frail and a bit husky for a few days, but eventually she was able to talk to us. The first thing she asked her mom and I was why everything was so very blurry. Ginny spoke to the head of the ophthalmology department and they wheeled Abby down to do a thorough examination of her eyes. Ginny understood what the doctor was telling us better than I did, but from my understanding of the situation, the pressure inside Abby’s brain had also pushed on her eyeballs and they had been forced into an elongated shape like a football instead of the round shape of a normal eye. And when the fluids and whatever had drained from her brain the eyeballs had apparently remained in the now elongated state. With an eyeball that is longer than normal a person is very nearsighted, and apparently Abby was now so very nearsighted she was going to need fairly strong glasses in order to be able to see. The one saving grace to all of this was that Abby would likely be able to see almost normally with the proper glasses. Her glasses were ordered, although the doctor warned us that they would be quite thick. And it looked like her prescription was a bit stronger than the glasses she was going to have to wear for a while because the doctor hoped that the myopia that had developed would regress. So they were going to order Abby glasses that had a -15D prescription rather than the -18D that she would need if her eyes did not heal and become less myopic. Neither Ginny nor I knew much about wearing glasses. My mom and dad wore reading glasses as they got older, but neither of my brothers wore glasses. Ginny had a sister that wore glasses as she was nearsighted, but her glasses were not very strong, and Ginny figured that Lisa had read so much when she was younger that she had ruined her eyes. No one else in her family had glasses, but her dad had been complaining that his arms were no longer long enough. It was a real shock to us to see our daughter lying in her hospital bed and now wearing her new -15D glasses in order to see anything past the end of her nose. And what was worse was that she still could not see anything clearly any great distance away from her. By the time Abby was released from the hospital she had been back to the ophthalmology department a number of times. Her vision had not changed, and she was now wearing her new -18.50D myodisc glasses. Abby had her 8th birthday while she was still in the hospital and when we had her home again it sometimes surprised me to see Abby running around the house wearing her very powerful glasses. The eye doctor at the hospital had suggested that it would be a good thing for Abby to have her eyes looked at by him every 6 months to ensure that there were no retinal problems and that the prescription in her glasses was still the proper prescription for her eyes. Once Abby was discharged from the hospital and she had returned to a normal life and the routine of going to school and playing with her friends, we heard from the insurance adjustor from the company that insured the car that crashed into us. Fortunately, we had plenty of witnesses that gave statements saying our car was stopped before the other driver slammed into us because the adjuster was trying to say that this was a no-fault situation. I had my wits about me, and I had talked to a lawyer that had warned me that the other parties’ insurance would try to wiggle out of paying us what he felt we deserved. I showed him the door and gave him the lawyer’s business card, telling him not to contact me again. My lawyer contacted me a couple of months later and told me that he was having his own troubles with the insurance adjuster. We had discussed Abby’s vision problems with him, and Ginny had gotten a statement from the first ophthalmologist at the hospital who had looked after Abby’s eyes. In the statement the doctor had been very straightforward and he had written in his conclusion that Abby’s now severe myopia had been caused by pressure on the eyeballs as a result of the accident, forcing them to become misshapen and that they had grown to be permanently elongated. The insurance adjuster was of the opinion that Abby had just become very nearsighted and that the accident had not been the cause of this. Because of the closed mind and the stubbornness of the insurance adjuster it looked as though this was going to be a real court battle. Our lawyer had filed suit for $2.5 million dollars, as it was his, and our, contention that Abby would, in the future, incur many problems from her high myopia. We had enough family members willing to give testimony that there were no other family members on either side of our families that had any significant form of high myopia, and even Ginny’s sister, the only one in the family who wore glasses, had a very low prescription of -2.50D. Abby was 11 years old by the time our case made it to court. In the 3 years that Abby had been wearing her glasses her eyes had been examined by our own eye doctor, who had not found it necessary to increase the prescription in her glasses at all. She had also been examined by at least 2 and maybe 3 doctors from the insurance company that we were suing. There was once a statement made by someone that perhaps Abby had been a bit nearsighted prior to the accident, but fortunately Ginny had taken Abby and Mitch to a local eye doctor just before Mitch started school the fall before the accident and the eye doctor had given both kids a clean bill of health as far as their eyesight was concerned. Other than Abby’s eyesight the actual measurable damage to our family was minimal. Mitch had not gotten any more than a few bruises. Ginny had I had healed, although we had been sore for a few weeks afterwards. Abby’s broken arm had healed nicely, and her hair, which had completely grown back, covered any signs of where they had drilled her scalp. The only signs of the traumatic accident were the thick myodisc eyeglasses that Abby wore. And between you and me, the powerful glasses that Abby had to wear every waking moment of the day only increased her cuteness in my opinion. Yes, you read this correctly. I loved to look at my darling little girl, her eyes now trapped forever behind the thick lenses she needed in order to even see as far as the pages in a book that she was reading. I liked to watch her while she was looking at television. Her glasses were properly adjusted on her face but like all glasses, they still slipped a little, and when she looked at the TV screen sometimes she would squint at the screen and then she would push her glasses tighter to the bridge of her nose. I enjoyed watching that. When we first realized that Abby would need to wear glasses for the rest of her life, I had gone on the internet to see what I could find out about myopia. There was quite a dearth of information, but most myopia developed slowly and naturally. There were some schools of thought that felt that myopia developed during the school years, and then once the child wore glasses the myopia increased more and more until the child was in their early to mid-20’s. But none of this pertained to Abby except for the possibility that her already strong glasses might cause her vision to worsen during her years of puberty. I also discovered that a large number of men found ladies who wore glasses to be very special people and they were really attracted to these ladies. I could now understand their feelings, although I wondered just what the attraction was. For me it seemed to be two things. A beautiful woman who wore strong glasses was no longer as beautiful to most people due to the strong glasses. But to those men who liked them, wearing the glasses made them a more approachable person. And then there was the vulnerability of the glasses wearer. Without their very strong glasses they were literally helpless. I discovered that none of the men that had expressed a liking for girls wearing thick glasses would ever have taken the glasses away from one of these ladies, but they just liked the factor of vulnerablility. I agreed with this, as I would never even think of taking Abby’s glasses away from her, and when she had me clean the lenses for her I loved to watch her eyes with their vacant look. She would not even try to focus on things, because she could not see anything. Our attorney had cautioned us not to expect a settlement for the full amount. Since he was paid on contingency, the higher the amount he won for us would benefit him as well. Because of this we did have hopes that the settlement would still be quite sizable. As the proceedings dragged into the third day with no signs of the insurance company’s lawyer giving in, I began to worry that the settlement would end up being very small. But I had not counted on the tenacity of our lawyer. As the other side brought forward their witnesses to testify that Abby was likely just naturally nearsighted, our lawyer brought forth her own ophthalmologist from the hospital as well as 2 other noted eye doctors who testified that, while the circumstances in this case were anything but normal, the decrease in Abby’s previously non glasses wearing vision was indeed caused by the internal brain pressure on her eyeballs that was a result of the accident. Members of our immediate family were called to testify about their 20/20 vision and even Ginny’s sister Lisa, the only glasses wearer of her entire family, was called to testify. Lisa testified that she had read so much when she was younger that her eyes, at the age of 13 when she was undergoing puberty, had become slightly myopic, and she then needed glasses to see clearly things that were in the distance. Our attorney even put his own daughter on the stand. Mandy had needed glasses at the age of 11, and now at the age of 16 her glasses appeared to be fairly strong. After going through the progression of Amanda’s eyesight he then recalled one of the doctors from the insurance company. He asked the doctor if what Mandy had testified to about her vision was a fairly normal progression, and when the doctor replied that it was, he then eviscerated his earlier testimony about Abby likely needing glasses anyway. Things were looking up for us. Finally, on the afternoon of the 5th day there was nothing more that could be said. The jury was going to have to make their decision on this case based on the testimony provided. Our lawyer felt reasonably confident that he had made a good case, and I certainly agreed. But even if they did not award us the full amount, I was still going to provide Abby with the best and necessary vision care in the future. The jury was out for just over 2 hours. I think the judge had been ready to call it a day and send everyone home, but before he had decided to do that the bailiff came to tell him the jury had reached a decision. When they came back in the foreman read the decision. They had not awarded us the full $2.5 million, but they did give us $ 2 million. Even after the lawyer got his contingency fee, we were still going to have a pretty decent amount of money left to care for Abby’s eyesight over the coming years. We had no way to know the future, but hopefully Abby would not require much more than a new pair of glasses every couple of years. According to her ophthalmologist slight increases in her prescription would be a normal result of her severe myopia, but he felt that any increases would be minor and would not increase her prescription much over -20D. Specs4ever March 2019