Hi
I have no talent for writing stories, and haven’t written any since I was at school. However considering the slowness of this forum, lately, I thought that I would try to write one, based on an idea I had prompted by the current situation. Hopefully no one will be offended by the subject of the story.
Here goes.
All the best
Lou
Hello. My name is Caitlin. I live in the UK, I’m 14 years old and I’m in Yr 10 at Secondary school. I wear glasses full-time because I’m short-sighted. My prescription is around -4.00 in both eyes, and my distance vision is pretty rubbish without my glasses.
This is my story about how I became short-sighted, which I never expected to happen to me. You see, my family are all a little bit long-sighted. Not a lot, just enough to wear glasses sometimes for reading a long time before presbyopia starts. For example, my Mum Lucy is 35 and my Dad Dan is 37. Both have had glasses for reading for as long as I can remember. Mum rarely wears hers and Dad’s come out when he needs to read the small print of something, normally the instructions of some complicated toy my Aunt Sarah has bought us for Christmas or Birthday. My older brother Joe and I wore glasses for long-sightedness at school from around the age of 5, and virtually grew out of them by the time we were 9 or 10, and I never wore them at all by the time I started secondary school when I was 11.
Something happened last year at school. There are twenty nine kids in my class. They are a nice bunch and we have all bonded well. A couple of them have always worn glasses, but something happened when we returned to school after the Easter holidays. A few extra students started wearing glasses to read the white board. One of them was my best friend Keeley, who wasn’t surprised, as both her parents are myopic, and they both started wearing glasses to read the blackboard at school around the age of 13.
The thing is, it didn’t stay at just a few students, more and more students starting wearing glasses to read the white board, with some wearing them full-time. After a month, 10 of the 29 were wearing glasses, and our teachers started thinking that something wasn’t right and this was some kind of trend, with one of the students obtaining glasses somewhere and giving them to his or her friends to wear. The parents of all the students who had started wearing glasses recently, were contacted and all confirmed that their children had been prescribed glasses by an optician, and no, they didn’t think that their children were faking myopia just to get glasses, and a lot of them were worried how their children were genuinely struggling to see and becoming more and more dependent on glasses.
After 6 weeks, it was 15 students, after two months, it was 20 out of the 29, then 25, then it happened to me. I went into school one day, and suddenly found that I couldn’t see the white board from my normal desk two thirds back from the front. I had to ask Keeley to move with me nearer to the white board. Over the next few days it got worse, and I could barely see the white board from the front row. I told my Mum who took me to my usual optician, who was not expecting to see me for two years, as 6 months ago, my long-sighted prescription had decreased to only +0.50 right and +0.25 left. He was shocked that I was now requiring a prescription of -1.75 right and -2.00 left, especially since a lot of my extended family were patients and most were slightly long-sighted.
Since a similar thing was happening in other classes as well, the education department called in a hospital eye specialist who concluded that we had all contacted a virus that attacked the eyes only, mimicking the affect of a growth hormone on the eyes and causing them to elongate. The effects were sadly irreversible, and my prescription has now climbed to -4.00 in both eyes. I see an eye specialist regularly, as do my classmates, and after treatment with anti-viral medication, our prescription increases do seem to be slowing down. I don’t really mind having to wear glasses, especially since all my friends do too, but I do feel sorry for my best friend Keeley. She was most likely to end up myopic anyway owing to her family history, but the added affect of the virus has given her a prescription of -12.50, which is the strongest by far in her family.