When you grow up in a small town your selection of young ladies to date are rather limited. Even though I have always liked the appearance of a glasses wearing girl and had dated quite a few of the girls around my age who wore glasses, when Jamie Baxter came to me to tell me that she had missed her period during the second month we were dating I decided that I would marry Jamie. At the time Jamie was 18 and had started working at the local pharmacy as a cashier. I had been working for Speedy Cartage, doing the local deliveries and was waiting until I turned 21 so that I could drive tractor trailer across state lines. I had a year to go, and in the meantime, I was restricted to the boundaries of our large and remote state. I don’t know if I was ready to get married and start raising children, but my parents and grandparents had instilled in me that even if what you had to do was not exactly what you wanted to do, you had to do the right thing. And in this case, getting married was the right thing. Jamie and I didn’t announce it to the world, but we got the marriage license, and with both sets of parents and a few friends we were married by the preacher at Jamie’s church. We had rented an apartment over the hardware store on the main street. Our furnishings came from cast offs from our parents, the local thrift store, and a few wedding gifts. But we made do, and with a brand-new queen-sized bed we were set for a while. By now Jamie was in her third month, and while she really hadn’t started to show, you could see that her belly was getting a bit bigger. Jamie had gotten her beginners driver’s license soon after she was 16 and had progressed to her full driver’s license before she graduated from High School. I knew she had done the vision test when she got her full license, and it was not restricted to the wearing of glasses. It was a little bit of a surprise to me when Jamie seemed to be having trouble watching the television in our apartment. She was unable to read the weather and other small print that scrolled across the bottom of the screen, so I suggested that we should head to town to get her in to see an eye doctor. The nearest eye doctor was in a much larger town about 30 miles away. There they had a mall, and I knew that there was an optical store that had an eye doctor sort of attached to it. They offered a one-hour service on most prescriptions, so that is where we went. I had heard a rumor that even though the eye doctor was supposed to be independent from the optical store that very few people left the eye doctor’s office without buying a new pair of glasses from the optical store. I sort of hoped that was true, because I wouldn’t have minded seeing Jamie wearing glasses, although I knew they would be a fairly weak pair. Sure enough, Jamie did need glasses, and we left there a couple of hours later with Jamie wearing her new glasses. The prescription was indeed quite weak and was only -1.75D for both eyes. Maria, one of my previous girlfriends had a prescription of -8.50D and her glasses had flat fronts which reflected the light in interesting ways, but I knew Jamie would never reach Maria’s prescription. At least she was now wearing glasses, which was a bonus that I had not counted on when we were married. By the final stages of her pregnancy Jamie had gotten rather large, so it was not a huge surprise when we had a healthy 9-pound baby girl. Jamie wanted to name our daughter Ava, and I had no objection to the name, but I knew that when Ava reached school age there would likely be a couple of other Ava’s in her grade. It’s funny, but a name comes into popularity, gets overused, and then falls out of favor for a few years before it returns. My mom’s name is Karen, my mother-in-law is Anne, my sister in law is Jennifer, and my own sister is Heather. Not one of them were the only girl with their name throughout their school years. Now all these names had fallen out of favor, but trust me, they will all return in due time. The biggest surprise to me was a couple of months after Ava’s birth, when Jamie told me that she thought she needed to go back for another eye exam. I was not disappointed at the news, but I wondered why this had happened. After her eye exam was finished, I asked the eye doctor why Jamie had gotten more nearsighted after the baby was born and he explained that he called it mother’s myopia. Apparently, a female has a lot of changes in their body when they are pregnant and sometimes soft tissue such as eyeballs tend to change shape. I was going to have to look this up on the internet when I got home, but in the meantime, I liked the appearance of Jamie’s new -3.75D glasses. The extra -2.00 diopters were certainly noticeable in the thickness of her lenses. Now Jamie wore her glasses all the time. She was home with Ava for another few months and her mom had agreed to look after Ava when she went back to work. I had finally turned 21, and I was making more money because I could do the longer trips from the terminal in our town to other terminals. Now I got mileage plus hours, and this made a real difference in my pay. I knew Jamie’s parents were better off than my own parents and when Jamie’s dad suggested that if Jamie and I wanted to buy a house, he would help us out by loaning us some money for a down payment. I wasted no time on taking him up on his offer and we found a nice, older single-story house not too far from where her parents lived. It needed some fixing up, but my dad was a carpenter, and with his help we soon had the house ready to move into. We had barely moved into our own house when Jamie became pregnant again, Ava was now 18 months, and she was quite a handful. We had not decided that it was time for another baby, but we were pleased all the same. Jamie again started to complain of blurred vision and this time I managed to look it up on the internet. According to what I read; it is quite common for women to complain of blurred vision during pregnancy. Highly myopic ladies often became significantly more nearsighted. But what I garnered from my research was that you should not rush a pregnant lady off to the eye doctor because these vision changes are often temporary. Purchasing stronger glasses could actually lead to the pregnant lady adapting to the new, stronger prescription, and then the temporary might become permanent. I took Jamie back to the same one hour optical where we had gotten her previous 2 pairs of glasses. Jamie was not far enough along to where she showed, and sure enough the eye doctor found that her prescription had jumped another -1.25D. We purchased her a new frame and lenses, and I ignored the optician’s suggestion that we should purchase a higher index lens. If we were having a boy, we would probably stop with 2 children, and I knew that this might be my last chance to see Jamie wearing a pair of reasonably thick glasses. When the optician brought the tray containing her new glasses out to her Jamie didn’t even examine the glasses. She just let the optician put them on her face, and when they didn’t need any adjustments, we left the store without Jamie even looking at herself in a mirror. I told her that she looked fantastic wearing them, and she was satisfied. It wasn’t until I got home the next afternoon that she mentioned that her new glasses looked to be pretty thick, and I just shrugged it of with an :”If that’s what you need, that’s what you need.” Nothing more was said about her “thick” glasses and the pregnancy continued to term. Kevin James was an easier birth than Ava had been, which is pretty normal for a second pregnancy. Ava was 3 years old, and it was at her birthday party when I noticed Jamie squinting to see things. She had not complained about her vision at this point, but I knew it was time for another visit to the eye doctor. Jamie had not gone back to work yet. But her maternity leave was about to run out so I suggested that maybe she should have an eye exam before she returned to her job. This time her prescription had only jumped another -1.25D but we did not buy her new glasses that day. I had been doing some searching on the internet and glasses were available for a lot less than they were at the optician’s we had been using. I showed Jamie the selection of frames, and she found a pair she liked. I knew how to measure her pupillary distance and I ordered her new glasses. But when I ordered them, I put in -7.25D for the spherical – a full diopter over what the doctor had prescribed. And, thinking of the -8.50D prescription I had liked so much in Maria’s glasses I also ordered a pair of glasses in the same frame with a prescription of -8.50D. I did go for a higher index lens in the -8.50D glasses though as I knew Jamie would not be happy with the thicker glasses and I thought maybe the lens thickness might be close enough that she would never notice. When the 2 pairs of glasses arrived at the post office, I picked them up and opened the package in private. I had been correct, the lenses in both pairs looked pretty close to the same thickness. I took the lower index -7.25D glasses home to Jamie, and she didn’t even notice that they were a bit stronger than what she needed. She just put them on, told me that everything was so much clearer and went on with looking after the kids. Our plan had been to have a girl and a boy and then quit. But we had done nothing about this, and Jamie had not gone back on the pill. Ava was 4, KJ was almost 2, and Jamie was pregnant. I came home from work one night to find Jamie wearing her glasses, which were now a couple of years old, all taped up around the right lens and temple. KJ had grabbed her glasses and they had broken. The timing was perfect. Jamie was all upset because until now she had not ever gone without glasses and had not realized how bad her eyesight was without them. With that I explained that back when we had ordered her glasses on the internet, I had ordered a spare pair in case she broke her glasses and both pairs had been cheaper than one pair would have been at the optical store. Jamie was quite happy when I gave her the second pair, and when she put them on, she was thrilled. Apparently, according to her, she could see a lot better with the new pair, even though I told her they were the same prescription. She just said that she couldn’t explain it, but everything looked a lot sharper now. I removed her other glasses from the scene of the crime and hid them away. The new -8.50 glasses were not quite flat on the front like Maria’s glasses had been, but I loved the cut in of Jamie’s face in the sides of the glasses. These glasses looked to be pretty strong, and I finally had gotten what I never thought I would have – a wife who needed strong glasses. Jamie had just put her glasses on her face when she got the second pair and she had only taken them off to sleep and bathe. She wore them all the time and it wasn’t until KJ had broken her other glasses and she had to attempt to see well enough to tape them up that she realized that her vision at any distance was toast. She had worn the replacement glasses with the -8.50D prescription for few months before we had a conversation about how bad her vision was, and she showed me that she had to bring a book she was reading to within about 5” of her face to be able to see the words. If she hadn’t already been almost due to give birth again, I would have made love to her right there on the living room floor. Our third child was a baby girl. By the time Lindsay was 6 months old both Jamie and I had a suspicion that there was a problem with her eyesight. She grabbed at everything and brought it right up to her face. Jamie took Lindsay to our own doctor, and he confirmed that Lindsay seemed to be quite shortsighted, so he made an appointment with a pediatric ophthalmologist. It took another month before we were able to see the doctor, and he confirmed that Lindsay couldn’t see much of anything past the end of her nose. But he examined her eyes thoroughly and he advised us that Lindsay’s eyes were healthy, with no other problems other than she was very nearsighted. He could not get a really good reading of her prescription, but he did give us a prescription that he thought would be satisfactory to allow Lindsay to have reasonable vision. In our discussion the doctor wanted to talk about the possibility that Lindsay inherited her severe myopia from her mom, and at first, he was not willing to believe that Jamie had not even worn glasses until her first pregnancy with Ava at the age of 18. Also, there were no other members of either of our families who were nearsighted. The doctor told us that normally he did not examine the eyes of older patients, but that he would like to check Jamie’s eyesight. I wasn’t sure if that was a good idea because I didn’t know what Jamie remembered about her prescription. It had been over 3 years since her last actual eye doctor’s visit, and I need not have worried because Janie had not remembered what her prescription had been. We left the pediatric ophthalmologist’s office with a prescription for 2 pairs of glasses. Jamie now needed glasses with a prescription of -9.50, a full diopter above what she had been wearing. Lindsay needed glasses with a prescription of -12D and we were not sure if we could order them online or not. The doctor had diagnosed Lindsay with what he called congenital myopia and one of the first things I did when I got home was to check this out on the internet. Congenital myopia is present at birth and is generally diagnosed before the age of 6 years. During the pre school years the condition generally does not worsen, however, as in Lindsay’s case, the initial eye exam often does not correct the condition fully. This is partially due to the child not being able to answer any of the subjective questions, and the doctor has to rely on the instruments he uses for the testing to come up with a prescription that is suitable for the infant. And most eye doctors will under prescribe slightly using the theory that too strong an initial prescription might cause the child to adapt to that amount of myopia. All that made sense, and while I was seriously thinking about increasing Jamie’s prescription to at least -10D there was no way I would purchase anything other than what the doctor ordered for Lindsay. Lindsay’s -12D glasses were round in shape and were an almost clear pink tinted plastic that was very flexible. They were held to her face by an elastic strap, which had to be adjusted to the point where it could not be pulled off but was not too tight to cause Lindsay any irritation. Jamie’s new -10D glasses were a rather large sized plastic frame in a multicolored cat’s eye design. Even with the 1.67 index lenses they looked quite thick, and the edge thickness was around half an inch, which in metric would be somewhere around 12mm. The cut in was more pronounced, and when I looked at Jamie from a distance it looked even greater. Finally, I had the flat fronts that I had dreamed of, and I loved the looks of Jamie wearing her glasses. All of the research I did on myopia lead me to believe that Lindsay’s congenital myopia was an anomaly. In my reading about myopia, I discovered that the first-born child was more likely to be myopic than the other children. And I also found out that treatment with 0.01% atropine drops had been proven to reduce the increases in many high myopes by as much as 50%. With this, there was hope that we would be able to maintain Lindsay’s myopia at a lower level than it possibly could reach. What was even more interesting to me was that Jamie did not fall into any particular category of myopes. She had developed her myopia when she was over 18, and by that age, even if what she had was adult onset myopia, she should not have become anything more than a low myope. The mother’s myopia explanation made sense, and the temporary myopia of pregnancy was well documented to usually recede after giving birth. I suspected that by getting Jamie a pair of glasses when she was pregnant with Ava it had allowed Jamie’s eyes to adapt to her prescription and even become slightly more myopic. I certainly had not helped the situation when I increased the prescription in her glasses. But that did not explain why Jamie then needed another small increase after about a year of wearing her -10D glasses. That time I did not add anything to her prescription, and she wore her -11D glasses for another year. By then Lindsay was more verbal, and the pediatric ophthalmologist was able to come up with a prescription that he thought would give Lindsay reasonably good vision. Lindsay’s new glasses were -13D, and after a fruitful discussion with the doctor we decided that we would continue to monitor her vision and if it looked as if her myopia was starting to climb, we would start Lindsay on the 0.01% atropine treatments. Lindsay was much happier with her new glasses. They had legs that hooked behind her years, and she was able to take them off if she wanted to. She couldn’t see very well without them, so she very seldom did take them off, but she liked the fact that she could , as I suppose the strap had been an irritation. Not too long after Lindsay got her -13.00D glasses Jamie wanted to go for another eye exam. We returned to the same doctor she had started off with at the place in the mall. The doctor was very surprised that Jamie’s myopia had advanced so far and her new prescription was exactly the same -13.00D as Lindsay’s was. I had really liked the -10D glasses, and the -11D ones were perfect, but when I saw Jamie wearing her new -13.00D glasses I was over the moon in love with her once again. Specs4ever Oct 2020