Mike and I had been going together for the last two years of university, and we decided that we would marry the summer that we graduated. We did and we first rented a nearby apartment that enabled us to commute to our jobs using public transit. We knew we were going to have at least 2 children, and that would likely result in the eventual move to suburbia and a much longer commute. But our plans were to have the finances set aside for a decent down payment by the end of a 5-year period. Our plans were on track for the first 3 years, but I had a problem with the birth control pills I was taking, and the doctor wanted me to go off them for at least 6 months. It was towards the end of the 6-month period when I missed my period. Mike had been using condoms most of the time but………… Oh well, adjustments in plans sometimes have to be made. Mike and I went searching for a house, and fortunately we found one that was big enough for a small family, close enough for our daily commute, and not priced too far out of our budget range. And as a bonus we were near enough to Mike’s parents that we could have his mom babysit so I could return to work. Rachel was a cute, healthy baby. By the time she was 3 years old she was a joy to have around. Now she could “use her words” and Nana was wonderful with teaching her so many things that I wished I could have had the time to do. And when Nana was busy or needed a break Rachel’s Oma(my mom)would come to the house and stay with us for a few days. Of course, just when things seemed to be going so well, I found I was pregnant again. My mom didn’t want to look after a baby, and Mikes mother would help out, but she felt there was no way she could look after 2 young children, and we didn’t blame her for this. The easiest way to handle the situation was for us to find a play school for Rachel, and fortunately we found a great little Ukrainian church run play school. Now Mike would ride to the playschool in the morning with Rachel on a seat on his bike, and he would then bicycle on to work. Things were going really well for us. Brandon was a great baby and Mike’s mom was pleased to be looking after him. Rachel seemed to like her playschool, and after 6 months of breast-feeding Brandon, I was ready to go back to work. I had been wearing my glasses much of the time I had been home with Brandon, and the first thing on my to do list was to get new contacts and glasses. I had gotten the glasses I was wearing well before Rachel was born, and I knew they were too weak. My contacts had been updated sometime before I was pregnant with Brandon, and even with my contacts in my vision was not as good as I thought it should be. Mike wears glasses because he is a little myopic, but his eyes are not nearly as bad as mine are. I think he is around a -2.50D and he is lucky as he can take his glasses off to read. I have to hold a book almost at the end of my nose to see anything, and that just is awkward. I went to my appointment with my eye doctor and was told that my eyes had indeed deteriorated – quite a lot was what she said. My new contacts were going to be -10.00D, although she told me that they could stand to be another -0.25D but my brand was only made in -0.50D steps after -10.00D and she didn’t want to give me stronger contacts than I really needed. But they did order my new glasses in my full prescription. I don’t remember now what that was, but I think it was something like -12.00D. I know it was stronger than my contacts. My old contacts were -8.50D, and I knew my old glasses were getting close to -10D, but they were not quite there yet. My new contacts were great. I could see perfectly again, but what was a little surprising was that my glasses gave me slightly better vision. Brandon’s Nana was doing the same fantastic job of looking after Brandon as she had done with Rachel. Rachel had taken to playschool like a fish takes to water and she loved it. I had never met her, but her best friend at playschool was named Joelyn, and Rachel often talked about Joelyn and what they had done together all day. I surmised that Joelyn wore glasses because one day Rachel asked me why Joelyn couldn’t see anything without her glasses, but Rachel could see pretty much everything when she put Joelyn’s glasses on. I didn’t think much of that at the time and I just told Rachel that glasses are made for your eyes only and she should not ever put someone else’s glasses on. My eye doctor had suggested to me that if I wanted to be able to wear contacts for the long term it would be better if I wore my glasses more frequently. She said that at this time my eyes looked very healthy, but after she questioned me about my contact lens wearing routine, she suggested glasses would be better for me to wear when I was just around the house. That didn’t upset me as much as it might have a few years earlier, and I was quite satisfied with the vision my newest glasses gave me. I didn’t like that they were still getting thicker, but I had broken the bank to get a pair with the newest thin lenses I could get, and they really did not look that awful on my face. Actually, Mike told me I looked very attractive wearing them. Still, I had a hard time wearing glasses. My own Oma had worn glasses with very thick lenses, and as much as I loved her, I hated looking at her eyes behind the thick lenses. Her eyes looked as if they were sunk back into her face and were really tiny behind the lenses. My own mom wore glasses, but her glasses were more like mine and didn’t look as awful and thick as my Oma’s had looked. Mom, Nana and Mike and I went to the playschool concert along with Brandon, who because of his young age would not ever remember being there. That day I met Rachel’s best friend Joelyn, and her parents, Joe and Ellen. It wasn’t hard to figure out where Joelyn had come from for a name. What was surprising though was that Joelyn wore glasses with lenses that looked to be just as thick and strong as my Oma’s had looked and her eyes, behind the lenses, looked to be very similar in appearance to the eyes of my Oma’s. I felt an instant dislike towards Joelyn, but I knew that this little girl could not help the fact that she had very bad eyes. She was also my own daughter’s best friend and I was going to have to swallow my personal feelings. Joe and Ellen were really nice people. Joelyn was their only child and Ellen confessed to me that they were a little afraid to have another child. Apparently Joelyn had been born very nearsighted as all children are, but her eyes had never returned to the point where it could be considered normal for a child her age. Ellen was afraid that this might have been a genetic defect and was scared that another child might also have poor eyesight. Her pediatrician had told her that Joelyn’s severe congenital myopia was likely just a one-shot deal, but Ellen was hesitant. They loved Joelyn with all their heart, but really were not prepared to have a second very nearsighted child. I asked her if her pediatrician had told them what the odds of this happening again were and she told me they were very small. Apparently, every baby is born very nearsighted but by the time they are a month or two old the myopia has changed to a slight degree of hyperopia. The farsightedness lasts for quite a few years, and at some point, it shifts to emmetropia. Some children then go on to develop myopia, but this generally happens between the ages of 8 and 15. The younger the child is when this shift to myopia occurs often leads to the child having a higher myopic prescription. By the time the concert ended, and the luncheon was finished Joe and Ellen seemed like old friends. I still felt sorry for Joelyn having to wear her strong glasses to be able to see anything, but this no longer mattered to me. After all, it wasn’t like Rachel was going to catch a case of severe myopia from Joelyn. And Rachel was going to stay over at Joelyn’s place on Friday night. This sleepover went so well that Joelyn came to our house the following weekend, and from then on it seemed as if Rachel wasn’t at Joelyn’s house Joelyn was at ours. It was really nice that Rachel and Joey were such good friends. The girls were inseparable for the rest of their two years at playschool and I dreaded what would happen if they did not go to the same junior kindergarten. Fortunately, we were in the same school district as Joe and Ellen were so the girls ended up in the same class. I had taken Rachel for a complete checkup before she started JK, and other than the doctor telling me that Rachel seemed to be developing a little bit of myopia she was in perfect health. Apparently at the moment her degree of myopia was so slight that the doctor didn’t feel that we even needed to get glasses for her at this time. With my family history of myopia, and because Mike also was slightly myopic, I was not surprised to hear this news. The doctor had suggested that Rachel should have another eye exam before she started grade 1. I made an appointment for her, and when the doctor announced the results I was devastated. In only a year Rachel’s slight myopia had climbed to the point where she was now being prescribed glasses that had a prescription of -5.00D. Now there was no question of getting glasses for Rachel. She needed them quite badly. A year later, around the same time in August, we had another appointment for Rachel to have her second eye exam. I had my own eyes examined at the same time, but while my eyes had not changed since the birth of Brandon, Rachel’s prescription had doubled. Now her new glasses were going to have to be -10.00D. At the age of 7 Rachel’s eyesight was almost as poor as mine was. I asked the doctor what, if anything, we could do to stop, or even slow down Rachel’s myopic progression. He advised me that there was not much that could be done. The use of atropine drops had been shown to work for some patients, but he was not sure what the long-term effects would be, and he suggested that we should wait to see what happened over the following year. Rachel and Joelyn were still joined at the hip. And now that they were both dependent on the strong glasses, they both had to wear they were even more alike. Ellen and Joe had decided that they would go ahead and have another child, but instead of a boy they had another girl. Their second daughter Alison was now 3 and she showed no signs of having the same vision problems as Joelyn. They were watching Alison very carefully though. Joelyn still had her regular yearly appointments to have her eyes examined and while there was no change in her prescription, they did buy her new glasses every year. The year that Rachel had gotten her first glasses Joelyn had chosen a very similar frame to the one Rachel wore, and when Rachel got her second pair with the -10D lenses Rachel had chosen the same frame that Joelyn had chosen. In hindsight I look back and think I should have known. I barely remembered the day that Rachel asked me why she could see through Joelyn’s glasses so she couldn’t understand why Joelyn couldn’t see anything without them. I suppose that it must have been around the time that they first started having sleepovers. But Rachel was very careful about what she was doing and neither I nor Ellen ever once caught Rachel wearing Joelyn’s spare glasses. Once Rachel had reached a point where her eyes began to be a little myopic it then took no time at all for her to reach a prescription of -5D. And after she got her own glasses to wear then it was much easier for her to wear a pair of Joelyn’s glasses much of the time. I doubt that her teacher would have even noticed that the lenses in her glasses were the same as the lenses in Joelyn’s glasses. Then, when her glasses had reached a prescription of -10D, it was probably very easy for Rachel to go around wearing Joelyn’s old glasses. A year later, when the girls were going into grade 3 Rachel’s prescription jumped another -5D. Now she was wearing lenses and frames that looked so close to Joelyn’s that I never would have noticed that she was wearing Joelyn’s glasses all of the time. And the next year, when it was time for another visit to the eye doctor Rachel ended up with a new prescription of -20D. I was aghast. Rachel’s glasses were now as strong as Joelyn’s were. Now Rachel’s eyes behind the strong lenses in her new glasses looked just like my Oma’s eyes looked behind her glasses. I was sure that Rachel had received her myopic genes from my side of the family, and my mom and I had just escaped the severe myopia that had been passed down to Rachel. I still felt a little bit of revulsion every time I stared through the strong lenses of Rachel’s glasses and saw her tiny shrunken eyes looking back at me, but I still loved her just the same. I did feel fortunate that she was healthy in every other aspect, but I hoped that her myopic progression would slow down, or even stop before her eyesight got so bad that she had real vision problems. When she had reached her -20D prescription her doctor had finally decided that after developing 20D of myopia in only 5 years she might be a good candidate for the atropine treatment, and I certainly agreed. At the time I was certain that it was the atropine drop treatment that stopped Rachel’s myopia in its tracks. A year later, at her annual eye exam, there had been no change in her prescription. We were pleased that this had worked, and we wondered if Joelyn should consider the same treatments. But Joelyn had never had any sort of an increase since she was around 2 years old and had gotten her -20D prescription. Ellen and Joe were quite happy that they had gone through with having a second baby, because Alison had shown no signs of developing myopia. And our son Brandon was in grade 1 and did not need glasses. By the time Rachel was 18 and was graduating from high school she had not needed any further increase in her strong prescription. She and Joelyn still both had the same -20D prescription and they often traded glasses back and forth. They had both been accepted into nursing school and were going to be roommates there. I couldn’t believe that their bond of friendship had stood the winds of time. They both had boyfriends, and they often double dated, and even though their strong glasses were the same, they were both now very different in appearance. Joelyn was blond, had a bigger chest size than Rachel and was only 2 or 3 cm’s shorter, which made her look a little stockier. Rachel was 170 cm tall, was a little thinner and had dark hair. Both girls were very attractive, and neither one of them seemed to have any desire to wear contact lenses. The day that Rachel left to go to nursing school I asked her if she had any regrets that her glasses had to be so strong. Her answer surprised me. “Not one Mom. After all you warned me that I shouldn’t wear Joelyn’s glasses because it might ruin my eyes. But Joey couldn’t see anything without her glasses. I could make my eyes see fairly well with them and if we wanted to both be exactly the same, I had to wear her glasses.” My daughter ruined her eyes so she could be just like her best friend. And I didn’t even catch what was going on. I don’t know if I was angrier at myself for not picking up on this, or if I was angry with her for what she did. Now she will have to forever live with the consequences of her actions. Specs4ever Dec 2018