My sister Diane, who is 6 years older than I am, got her first pair of glasses at the age of 13. I remember being fascinated by the fact that she could actually see through those 2 pieces of curved plastic that were now always in front of her eyes every waking moment, and I remember spending a lot of time wondering what was wrong with her eyes to make them need to wear glasses. I did ask her one day why she wore glasses and Diane told me she was nearsighted and that anything that was very far away became all blurry to her without her glasses so she really needed them to see clearly. I was only 7 years old at the time, and I decided I would like to wear glasses so I could be just like Diane. At the time my eyes could see everything just fine so I knew I would not be able to go to the doctor like Diane did to get a pair of glasses for myself. By the time Diane was 14 she had already needed to get new glasses 3 times and by the time she had her 15th birthday she had 5 pairs of her old glasses in her dresser drawer. I started to sneak into her room when she wasn’t around and I would take all of her old pairs out of their cases and would try them on to see if I could see through them. At first I could only see things clearly through the lenses of her first 3 pairs, but the longer I wore her glasses the easier it became to see through the two pairs that were stronger. Finally, after about 6 months of doing this I could actually see fairly well through the most recent pair of glasses that Diane had worn. This pair was the only pair that I could have worn out in public, because it was the one pair that had frames that would look right for a boy to be wearing. But I couldn’t take this pair of glasses to my room yet because I knew that Diane would still sometimes wear them at night when she was doing homework. I was about 6 months shy of my 10th birthday when Diane got the next new pair of what I would call pair number 7 glasses. I remember that there was a lot of discussion between our parents about how bad Diane’s eyes had gotten, and it was pretty obvious from looking at Diane wearing her newest pair of glasses that they were a lot thicker. The fronts of the lenses were almost flat, and these lenses stuck out behind the frame a lot more than the lenses in any of her other pairs. Most of the discussions between Diane and my parents now revolved around Diane wanting to get contact lenses. My dad was agreeable, but my mom felt that she should continue to wear her glasses until her eyes stopped getting worse, which according to the eye doctor should be somewhere around the time she turned 18. Now that pair number 6 had been relegated to Diane’s dresser drawer I felt it was fairly safe for me to take pair number 5 from the case they were kept in and take them to my own room. Now I would wear them in the sanctity of my room from the time I got home from school until I was called down for supper. Whenever I had the chance I would go off by myself to a quiet little grove the back woods on a Saturday and a Sunday and I would wear these glasses most of the day. I would take a book along with me and I would sit in an old lawn chair I had brought out there long ago to my favorite spot for reading. I didn’t know anything about myopia and myopic progression at the time, but I was having fun experimenting. When I would start reading I could only hold the book as close as about 10” away from the glasses on my face. But the longer I read, the closer I could bring the book, and after about an hour I was reading the pages of the book within about 5” away from my face. Any closer would make it a little uncomfortable to read, but sometimes I would bring my book to the point where it was almost touching my nose and I would attempt to read for just a little bit longer while doing this. Now I am quite a bit older, and after reading and researching myopia and it’s progression I have found a number of experts who say that wearing glasses that are too strong for you full time will indeed cause your eyes to become myopic. But these same experts say that part time wear will not cause any increase in myopia. I can’t argue with these so called experts, but I can tell you that from my own experience that by the time school let out for the summer holidays I knew I was going to need glasses before I went back into grade 6 in the fall. I could no longer read anything that my grade 5 teacher was writing on the board, and I had to call on some of my friends to borrow their notes. That summer I spent a lot of time off by myself back in the forest reading. Diane never seemed to put her glasses that I called pair number 6 on to read or do her homework ever since she got the pair I call number 7, and when I asked her why she didn’t she told me that her eyes had gotten so much worse that these glasses were not even strong enough for her to wear when she was reading. About mid-summer I decided I would take the chance, and I put pair 5 back in the case that belonged to pair 6 and I took pair 6 to my room and wore them as often and as much as I possibly could. I continued my practice of bringing my reading material up close to my eyes, and before long I was able to focus through these glasses when I brought my book right to the tip of my nose. It was a bit uncomfortable for me to read this way, but doing this certainly seemed to make my eyes get worse because now my distance vision was really quite poor. I switched pair 6 back to pair 5 one day, and when I was wearing pair 5 they almost seemed to be too weak for me, so I immediately went back to pair 6 to wear as much as I possibly could. By the middle of August I could hardly stand to be without glasses anymore. I wasn’t sure how I was going to manage to tell my parents that I thought I needed glasses and fortunately Diane spoke up at supper one night and told them that she thought she needed new glasses before she went back to school and had to pass the eye test for her beginner’s driver’s license. I then piped up and told them that I was having trouble seeing things clearly, so both Diane and I ended up with appointments for vision exams. Diane’s prescription had jumped from -8.75D up to -10.25D so she definitely needed new glasses. When the doctor examined my eyes he was quite surprised that I needed what he said was quite a strong first prescription. He asked me how long I had been having trouble seeing things and I told him that it had been going on for most of the past year, but it had gotten a lot worse over the summer. He made me up a trial frame with those funny lenses in them and he asked me to wear that prescription for a while. I went out into the waiting room and I looked around a bit, but I soon settled on reading a magazine. These lenses were like nothing in front of my eyes. Yes, I could now see things in the distance much clearer, but there was no pulling at all. After about half an hour the nurse took me back into his office and he took the trial frame off. He checked my eyes with the big machine again, and this time the line he wanted me to read was blurry. I heard a few clicks from the machine and then he asked me if I could read the line. I could, but I told him it wasn’t really clear, so he must have increased the power of the lenses a little more. Then he put a different pair of lenses in the trial frame and asked me to wear it again for at least another half an hour. I knew my mother was getting impatient waiting around, but the doctor came out and explained to her that he was having trouble establishing my prescription. According to what he told her, after I had worn the first prescription he had given me, when I went back in to have it checked I was found to need a lot more power in my lenses. I heard him tell mom that when a child requires quite a strong first prescription sometimes they need to come back in a month or two for even stronger lenses because they had been straining their powers of accommodation and he was trying to avoid that with me. With that, mom and Diane decided to leave me there and they were going to go out into the mall to do some shopping. The doctor made me wait almost a full hour before he took me back into his office. I had found some other magazines to read and I had spent the entire time with my nose pressed into a book, so it didn’t surprise me when the doctor had to increase the power of the lenses even more. Finally he seemed to be satisfied and he gave me the prescription to give to my mom. Mom had already talked to the optician, and we had chosen a frame in case I needed glasses so I went over to the optical section and gave the girl we had talked to before my prescription slip. She was a little surprised that my prescription was so strong and she told me that it was very unusual for anyone to have a -5D prescription in their first pair of glasses. By the time my glasses were ready mom and Diane had returned and mom paid for my glasses. I put them on and everything was now perfectly clear. Just like Diane had done when she got her glasses, I now wore them from morning to night and soon everyone was used to seeing me wearing glasses. After I got back home I checked my vision with Diane’s number 6 glasses. They still pulled on my eyes a bit, and I could see everything a lot better than I could with my own glasses. The frame was a little more girly than I would have liked and I knew I couldn’t wear these glasses around Diane or my parents. But after I went back to school I did wear these glasses to school almost every day. I was in Junior High now and Diane went to High School at another location, so she never saw me during the day. I really liked the looks of Diane’s new glasses, the ones I called pair number 8, because the fronts were even flatter than the front surface was in pair 7, but while I was fascinated by these glasses I was starting to develop a little hesitation about trying to make my eyes bad enough that I could wear glasses just like that. The other kids in my class that tried my glasses on kept telling me I must be blind as my glasses were so strong and it was true; of the 6 other kids that wore glasses now I had the thickest ones. I did go back for another eye exam the next time Diane did. I was now 11 years old, and Diane was almost 17. As she thought, she required another increase, but this time it was only -0.75D and this was the lowest increase she had ever had. Also she had gone about 8 months this time. I knew from wearing my doctor prescribed -5.00D glasses when I was at home that I was definitely going to require stronger glasses, and after my exam I had to get new glasses that were -6.75D. I had tried wearing Diane’s pair number 7 glasses that had a prescription of -8.75D, and while I could wear them without too much trouble, I had decided I was not going to try to make my eyes any worse. I had done a lot more reading about myopia and it seemed that my eyes would get worse on their own and it would be a lot better for me in the long run if I just let it happen naturally. By the time Diane graduated from high school she had just turned 18. Mom had agreed to buy contact lenses for her for her 18th birthday, but before she could get them everything changed in a hurry. Diane had been going with the oldest son of a local farmer for more than a year before she graduated. Robin seemed to be a good guy. He was big and muscular and stood at least 6’2, and they made a cute couple as Diane was only 5’5. The funny thing about Robin and Diane was that they both wore glasses and from the looks of the lenses in Robin’s glasses they were at least as strong as Diane’s. Robin’s whole family wore glasses. His dad’s glasses looked to be weaker than mine, but his mom’s glasses had lenses with little circles in them so I knew she had a very strong prescription. Robin had to have a prescription of close to -11D and his 2 younger sisters both wore glasses that had flat fronts for their lenses. His older sister wore glasses that were similar in appearance to the ones their mom wore, and his younger brother, who was in the same grade as me wore glasses that were very close in strength to mine. Now it looked as if another glasses wearer was going to join their family, because Diane had just discovered she was pregnant. When Diane told Robin that she was now pregnant he immediately wanted to marry her and the first I heard of this was when Robin and Diane talked to my parents. Now mom and dad were no longer going to pay for contact lenses for Diane, but were instead going to give Robin and Diane some money for furniture. Instead of a big church wedding Diane and Robin were just going to be married at City Hall. Mom and dad and I were there, along with Robin’s whole family. His sister Samantha was 2 years older than Robin and was there with her husband Jeff, a lawyer that specialized in real estate sales. Samantha worked in his office as a receptionist, and I realized that I had occasionally seen her on the street and had admired her myodiscs more than once. Robin was 18, and his 2 younger twin sisters were 15. I had not seen them before the wedding because they were just that much older than I was that they were in junior high before I noticed them as glasses wearers. I did find both Bethany and Rochelle to be quite attractive and I liked seeing them wearing their strong glasses. Pete, the youngest, was a little older than me, and was in my grade at school. Pete had gotten his first glasses about 6 months before I had started wearing Diane’s old glasses out in public, and his prescription was fairly close to what mine was now. We had swapped glasses and we could each see fairly well through each other’s glasses. The funny thing about Robin’s family was that no one wore contact lenses, and in talking with Beth and Shelley my feeling was that they didn’t seem to feel that they wanted to wear them. I sort of wondered if Diane was still planning to get contacts, or if she would now be content to just wear glasses. Diane and Robin set up housekeeping in a new modular home that Robin’s dad bought for them to live in. It was set up on the main farm and I supposed that Robin would eventually take over the farm. It wasn’t long after the wedding that Diane found that she needed to get new glasses because her eyes had gotten worse during her pregnancy and I was a little surprised to see how much thicker her new glasses were. For a -12.50D prescription they appeared to be much thicker than I thought they should be, and I was a little surprised when Diane told me that Robin’s family didn’t believe it was worth the extra money to buy the thinner more expensive high index lenses. I had read somewhere that the standard index plastic lenses that had been around forever had to be made as myodiscs at a much lower prescription than the higher index ones did, and now I wondered just how strong Robin’s mom’s glasses and his sister Samantha’s glasses really were. Now that Diane had moved out of the house mom was cleaning out her stuff. I saw her old glasses in a pile of stuff that was going to be donated to the Lion’s Club, and I grabbed the case that contained the -8.75D pair, the pair I had called pair # 7. I had no real reason for doing this, as I had no plans to wear them. But I had noticed that my own glasses, which were by now about a year old, were no longer quite strong enough for me and Diane’s old glasses seemed to give me extremely good vision. It probably didn’t help my situation in that Diane’s old glasses were in a Ray Ban wayfarer style frame. This frame was one that could be worn by either a boy or a girl, and before long I found I was wearing her old glasses to school. I knew I shouldn’t have done this and I had earlier resolved not to force my eyes to get any worse. Pete had gotten new, stronger glasses and I lost my resolve so I started wearing Diane’s old glasses all the time. Mom saw me one time wearing them and she asked me if they were Diane’s old glasses. I told her they were, and I could see much better with them. She suggested I have my eyes tested again and get my own new pair, but I told her that there was no reason to spend the money because I could see perfectly. After showing her how well I could see things in the distance she had to accept that as long as I was seeing well, and wasn’t pushing for new glasses there was no reason to waste money. I wore Diane’s old -8.75D glasses for the next couple of years. I was in my last year at Junior High, and I knew I needed new glasses because I had noticed that things were not really clear anymore. I was in the library one afternoon looking for a book to read when I reached for one on the top shelf. The covers of library books are kind of slippery because they have that plastic stuff on them to protect them, and the book slipped from my hand and knocked my glasses to the floor. I couldn’t see them, so I got down on my hands and knees and started feeling around for them. Just then one of the girls that worked in the library saw me and came over to see what was wrong. It was a simple thing for her to find my glasses, but the frame had broken and one lens had fallen out. She helped me to the librarian’s desk and she was able to use clear tape to hold my lens in place. I had never really noticed her before, but after I got my glasses back on I could see that she was pretty cute. She introduced herself as Vivian, and she seemed to be quite interested in how visually impaired I was without my glasses. I got permission from the office to leave school and I walked to the eye doctor’s office. They could see that my glasses were broken and that I would be rather helpless without them so they told me if I waited they would try to fit me in. When I got in to see the doctor he asked me why I was wearing my sister’s old glasses as he had looked up my records and discovered that he had not prescribed them for me. Since they had made the glasses for my sister the receptionist must have looked up her records and found that these glasses had been hers. I simply told him that my eyes had gotten worse and I had tried my sister’s old glasses on and I found I could see perfectly with them. He didn’t say anything more, just cranked up the lenses in his machine until all the letters came clear on the smallest line. Then when he was finished he told me I would be able to see a lot better with my own new glasses. The optical section didn’t have a lot of frame choices, but the ones they had were sturdy frames that were a little less expensive than the ones you would find in a boutique shop. I chose a similar pair to the wayfarers that I had been wearing and the guy in the lab started grinding my new lenses. I could look through the window and watch him as he worked and when he took the lenses out of the grinding machine I was a little surprised at how thick the lens blanks were. They had not given me my prescription yet, so I didn’t have any idea of how strong my new glasses were going to be. It took a little over an hour before my lenses were fitted into the frame and I watched him as he checked the prescription for accuracy before he brought them out to the female optician. She called me over, and I took off my sister’s old glasses for the last time. The new ones really pulled on my eyes at first, but when I had them on I could see everything quite clearly. I had called my mom and she had given them her credit card number to use to pay for everything, so all I had to do was pick up my prescription and the receipt. When I was given the slip with my new prescription I was sure that the doctor had made a mistake. These new glasses had a prescription of -11.00D for each eye, with a -0.50D of astigmatism for the right eye and a -0.75D for the left eye. That was a pretty big increase over the -8.75D I had been wearing. But I sure couldn’t argue with the clarity of my vision. I looked at myself in a mirror as I walked out and my glasses did look to be rather thick now. But I still was fascinated with glasses, so I was pretty happy to be wearing them. Back at school I went to my next class. When we were going to the last class of the day I saw Vivian in the hall, and I walked over to her and thanked her for helping me out. She looked at my new glasses and told me that they looked great on me. I wondered a bit about that, because they were a pretty thick pair to be considered to be good looking. After class was dismissed I spotted Vivian in the hall walking towards me, but she didn’t seem to see me until I got fairly close to her. That made me wonder if she wasn’t a little bit nearsighted herself. I didn’t say anything about that, but just talked with her briefly. Over the next few weeks I saw Vivian around a lot. I had just turned 16, and one of the excuses I had been using in my mind for not dating was that I wanted to wait until I could drive. That time was coming, as I was taking driving lessons, but it would still be another year or so before I could drive by myself and carry passengers. I had been seeing a lot of Vivian around school, but had never thought of asking her out on a date, even though I had gotten the feeling that she would be very receptive. Finally I got up my courage, and we went to see a movie. Vivian wanted to sit in the lower section, a bit closer to the screen, and that’s when I knew for sure that she was definitely a little nearsighted. After the movie I managed to talk to Vivian about her wanting to sit up front, and she confessed to me that she was indeed slightly nearsighted. I asked her why she didn’t tell her parents and then she could get glasses. Her answer surprised me when she told me that she didn’t want to wear glasses with lenses that looked paper thin. She wanted to wear glasses that had nice thick lenses like mine had. I was a little shocked by her actually thinking that my thick lenses looked nice. I told her that she really needed to have an eye exam to determine her prescription, and then she could order glasses that were a bit stronger than the ones she really needed from an online optical store that I had been reading about on the internet. I had been thinking of ordering myself a second pair of glasses so that I could have a spare pair so I had been doing some research, and I had found this one place that I could order from that did not require prescription verification. A few days later Vivian came to me with her prescription for her first pair of glasses. It was a little stronger prescription than I thought it would have been, and I wondered if she had somehow convinced the doctor to make it just a little stronger than he could have. I had read that with children that needed plus glasses the need went unnoticed much longer than for myopic children. Apparently, the amount of accommodation in a child’s eyes could not really make an eye more hyperopic, but it could make an eye more myopic by giving the natural lens of the eye more plus. A myopic eye could not accommodate to give the eye less plus, making it less myopic, however there must be some amount of focusing that can happen in a myopic eye because most people who are given a minus prescription often have to come back in 6 months or less for an increase in their prescription and the only explanation that seems logical to me is that a myope is able to focus enough to lower the blur, and then when they get glasses the eye relaxes into its natural state and the myopic lens power needs to be increased. Vivian’s prescription slip read OD – 2.25 x -0.75 x 88 and OS – 2.25 x -1.00 x 95. I suggested that she would be pleased with that because her lenses would actually look like she really needed glasses. But she was adamant about wanting a stronger prescription. She had read about a girl online who increased her own prescription by -4.50 diopters and she wanted to add this amount to her prescription. Finally I talked her out of doing this. I suggested that a prescription as strong as -6.75 would be extremely difficult for her to adapt to. My suggestion, which she eventually agreed would be a better move, was to order two identical pairs of glasses. The first pair would have a prescription of – 4.50D for each eye along with the prescribed amount for her astigmatism. Then the second pair would be the -6.75D pair. Since the frames were going to be identical I told her that the chances were pretty good that no one would notice the difference in lens thickness, especially if we ordered the lower powered pair in a regular index plastic lens. Then the higher powered pair could be ordered with a thinner lens. Vivian liked this idea. She chose a frame that was priced at $25.95, and with the regular 1.50 index lenses as well as the anti-reflective coating for $4.95 meant that these glasses were going to cost $30.80. Then the pair with the 1.67 index lenses were going to cost another $34.95 along with the $4.95 for the coating. Shipping was going to be another $5.00 for both pairs and the total was just under $100.00. Vivian was amazed at how cheap these two pairs of glasses were going to be, and she was in a hurry to order them. We placed the order and she used one of those temporary cash credit cards to pay for them. Both pairs of glasses arrived in under 2 weeks. She showed up at school on a Tuesday morning wearing the first pair, and when I complimented her on how nice they looked she told me that she had tried the stronger pair on first, but they seemed a bit too strong for her to wear. She even admitted that the pair she was wearing had been a little hard for her to get used to. She had found the package in the mail the night before, and after determining that I had been correct in thinking that she could not wear the stronger pair yet she had immediately started to wear the weaker pair. I had figured, from what I read, that it would take between 3 and 6 months before Vivian would be able to switch up to the stronger pair. She managed to do it in a little under the 3 months, and before I knew it she was pushing me to help her order an even stronger pair. We had, over the past couple of months, had a number of discussions about why she wanted to wear glasses with a very strong prescription. She had told me that ever since she was very young she had been attracted to glasses. Even she was younger she had gotten her mom to buy her a number of pairs of sunglasses and she had even wanted to wear them inside the house all the time. But she didn’t really want the sunglasses, she wanted prescription glasses to wear and she was now happy that she was finally wearing them. I had read a little bit about a mental illness called BIID, which stands for body integrity identity disorder. The extreme of this disease is that some people feel they have the need to be blind, or have a leg or an arm amputated. Most people do not want to go to the extreme. Some are satisfied to use a leg brace, which in time will weaken the leg muscles to a point where the person can no longer walk without the leg brace. Others do not want to be blind, but they do want to have to wear extremely powerful glasses with either plus or minus lenses of a very high power. These people are generally not young enough anymore to increase their own myopia so they are forced to do this by using powerful contact lenses under corresponding prescription glasses in the opposite power. However, some young people are now starting to realize that they can make themselves develop a decent amount of myopia by wearing progressively stronger glasses to increase their myopia to a much higher power. Vivian, and to some extent myself, apparently both liked the appearance of powerful myopic lenses. I had wanted to wear glasses, and by wearing my sister’s stronger glasses I had increased my own prescription to a point that my glasses looked to be quite strong and I was very pleased with my appearance. Vivian wanted to have even stronger glasses than I did. I suspected that, while I fell into the category of having BIID, I knew for sure that Vivian had a rather severe case of BIDD. Within a 3 month period Vivian had already begun wearing the -6.75D pair of glasses, and within another 3 months she was wearing -2.75D contact lenses under her -6.75D glasses. I didn’t know that at the time, as I had not known that Vivian bought herself contacts when she first had her eyes examined. Vivian was a little upset with me when I would not immediately help her order even stronger glasses. I insisted that she should have her eyes examined so that a doctor could determine what her real prescription was before I helped her to reach her goal of wearing very strong glasses. About 10 months after getting her first eye examination Vivian went to see another doctor to have her eyes examined again. Without my knowledge she had gone for the past 3 months wearing a prescription of -9.50D by wearing her -2.75D contact lenses under her -6.75D glasses. She had not achieved her goal of reaching -9.50D, but had managed to bring her prescription up to very close to -9.00D. I was amazed to see this when she brought me her prescription slip so that I would help her order new glasses again. She still had not told me about wearing contact lenses under her glasses, and I believed that her eyes had really gotten so much worse on their own. That is why she was able to convince me to order her glasses that were -13.00D x -0.75 x 88 for the right eye and -13.00D x -1.00 x 95 for the left eye. The second pair of glasses I ordered in the same frame style was exactly -2D stronger. This time both pairs of glasses were going to have to be made with high index lenses, and there was not going to be any way we could disguise the fact that the -15D glasses were stronger, especially if they shaved the backs of the lenses off. It would be even worse if they made the stronger pair with biconcave lenses, but I knew Vivian would be more than willing to accept whatever they supplied. Again it took about 2 weeks for her new glasses to be delivered. Vivian had told everyone, including her parents, that her eyes had gotten a lot worse, and that her doctor had advised her that she had a severe case of progressive myopia. It was very obvious when Vivian got her new glasses that they were an extremely strong pair for a 15 year old girl that had only worn glasses for a little under a year. I think that the fact that she had been able to wear such strong glasses so quickly helped to have everyone believe her story and I am sure they all felt sorry for the young girl with the case of progressive myopia. Vivian really didn’t have any trouble wearing glasses that were -4.00D stronger than her real prescription. I was now in senior High, and Vivian was still in junior high, but we saw a lot of each other, and dated every weekend. She had no trouble seeing the players or following the ball at the school baseball or football games that we went to, and she seemed to be easily able to read the menu’s at any fast food place. Now at the movies she was willing to sit in the upper section and she never had any trouble recognizing friends at a distance. She did wear her -13D glasses for about 5 months before she switched to the -15D ones. The lenses in the -15D glasses were a little different as the outer edges were shaved off a bit, giving these glasses a myodisc appearance. A few questions were asked, but other than her mom being a bit worried about how strong her glasses were now nothing much was said. Vivian wore these -15D glasses for the rest of the school year. She had always been quite a reader, and she studied long hours so she got good grades in school. She was the valedictorian for her graduation from junior high, and I went with her parents to watch her give her speech and get her degree. I was still hanging around with Vivian, as we had dated all year and I had taken her to her graduation prom. I liked Vivian a lot, but it did worry me that she still wanted even stronger glasses. She had met my sister Diane, who had now had a second child and had needed stronger glasses after the birth that were quite similar in appearance to Vivian’s -15D ones. One day they exchanged glasses and they discovered that their prescriptions were quite close. Vivian also met Diane’s mother in law, as well as her sister in law Samantha and she was quite enamored with the myodisc lenses that both of them had in their glasses. She did exchange glasses with Samantha, and after the visit Vivian told me that she could see through Samantha’s glasses without much of a problem. I knew then that Vivian would want lenses like that the next time she could manage an increase. Vivian went all summer without saying anything about getting stronger glasses. Again I had not realized that she had started wearing her -2.75D contact lenses under her -15D glasses all the time as soon as she possibly could. By early October she was telling me that she could not see very well through her -15D glasses anymore. She didn’t know what her next step should be though, as when she had last gone to the optometrist she had been prescribed glasses that were only -9D. She didn’t even have a pair of glasses that were that prescription, so she didn’t know what she was going to do. I told her the only possible thing she could do would to go to a different optometrist, and if she really wanted to, because of her high myopia, she could likely have her doctor refer her to an ophthalmologist. She didn’t feel like she wanted to see a specialist, so I drove her to see an optometrist that was located at a mall on the other side of the city. I was extremely surprised when Vivian showed me her new prescription slip. Her right eye was now -16.50 x -1.50 x 88 and her left eye was -16.50 x – 2.00 x 95. If I added the -4.00D that she wanted me to add to her prescription she would not be able to order her new glasses online, as most of the online places only went to a maximum of -20.00D. Finally Vivian agreed that she would be willing to accept a -3.50D over correction, but was adamant about not getting the highest index lenses possible for her glasses. We ordered them with the same 1.67 index that she had in her -15D glasses, and when they came in the lenses were indeed shaved off on the outer edges, as well as by the nose, giving them a myodisc appearance. Vivian loved the looks of them and I was pretty sure that since we could not order stronger glasses online she was going to have to settle for wearing these glasses for a couple of years and then we could find a new eye doctor for her to visit. I would have been quite happy if Vivian never got stronger lenses, because it seemed to me that she was having trouble with the acuity these strong glasses gave her. She did wear these glasses until she graduated from high school. I had gone to the local community college and had taken a course in coding, so that I could do computer programming. I had graduated with the highest marks in my class, and had been the first one hired by a new startup software company. Vivian was quite interested in what I had been doing, and she decided that she would like to take the same course, so she signed up and planned on going to the community college in the fall. All the studying and the close work I had been doing over the last few years had caused my prescription to increase a little, and now I was wearing my new glasses with a prescription of -13.50 for both eyes with the same bit of astigmatism I had always had. My increases from the -11.00D I had been prescribed when I had met Vivian had been fairly small, but steady and I was sure that if I had wanted to I could have increased my prescription as Vivian had done. I worried a little about the possibility that all the close work Vivian would be doing would increase her prescription, but when I mentioned it to her Vivian told me she didn’t care how bad her eyes got. Fortunately, since Vivian was already wearing the strongest glasses we could purchase online I figured that further increases would be kept to ones that were discovered by having her annual eye exam. Of course she had never had an annual eye exam yet, but I was going to make sure that we both had a thorough and comprehensive vision exam at least once a year. I was worried about retinal detachments and other problems such as glaucoma and myopic macular degeneration, and early discovery of these problems would be for the best. Vivian ate up the -3.50D over correction she had in her newest glasses in a little under a year. When we went for our first annual eye exam at my insistence, the new doctor I chose found that Vivian’s glasses were close enough to the correct prescription for her to continue to wear for a while longer. Apparently her astigmatism correction could stand to be a little stronger, but her spherical was just strong enough to make up for that. My glasses had to have an increase of -0.50D to bring my acuity back to 20/20, however Vivian could not reach any better than an acuity of 20/30/. The doctor felt that even though her glasses could be changed to reduce the sphere by -0.50D, and her astigmatism could be increased in each eye by -0.75D, this was an excellent acuity for Vivian and he explained that very high myopes often could not even get to an acuity of 20/40. Vivian had never told me, nor had I ever spotted that she had been wearing contact lenses with a power of -2.75D under her glasses to help her achieve her high minus prescription faster. And after we had our comprehensive eye exam I still didn’t discover that she had once again started wearing those contact lenses under her glasses. It was quite a shock to me when the next annual eye exam revealed that Vivian had to have her glasses power increased by -2.50D. I helped her select new frames from the selection at the doctor’s office, and we ordered her new, very expensive myodiscs. Her new prescription included a much higher correction for her astigmatism, along with the -2.50D increase in her spherical, so her new glasses were now OD – 22.50 x -3.50 x 88 and her OS was -22.50 x - 4.00 x 95. Vivian had finished her coding course, and she was looking for a job, but first we were getting married. Vivian was 22 now, and I was 23, so it was time we started our life together. I liked my glasses. I enjoyed wearing them and I never regretted having done what I did to become myopic. It had been suggested that I should try contact lenses by a few people who apparently also had strong prescriptions, but I always told these people that I liked wearing glasses. And Vivian loved wearing glasses, so we made a perfect couple as we stood together in front of the preacher. My brother in law Robin’s younger brother Pete was my best man, and I guess I was a little smug as my glasses were now obviously stronger than his were. Vivian had gotten quite close to my sister Diane, who was her maid of honor. While Diane now wore myodiscs, as did her mother in law and her sister in law Samantha, it was again obvious that Vivian had the strongest prescription. Pete and Sam’s twin sisters, Bethany and Rochelle, showed up at the wedding wearing contact lenses, and since they were both working in the city I suppose they felt they were more attractive to guys without glasses. After we were married and were sharing the same bathroom I suppose it was a lot harder for Vivian to hide the fact that she was wearing contact lenses under her already strong glasses. But somehow she did, and I didn’t clue in to it at all. I knew that her case of BIID, and her desire to wear very thick glasses was much stronger than mine was, as I had decided a few years ago that I had no further need to increase my prescription. But my fascination for strong glasses had never lessened and I often caught myself staring at Vivian’s biconcave myodiscs. Even though her lenses were myodisc they were still extremely thick, as Vivian had ordered her lenses in the 1.5 index plastic instead of the higher 1.74 index. She had also chosen a plastic frame that had a bit larger eye opening than what the optician had suggested, and the front curve of her lenses looked to be about a 40mm bowl. The rear curve was, as it should be, much smaller and was likely a 30mm bowl. The lenses, when viewed from the side, looked to stick out to the front by about 10 mm, the frame was about 3 or 4 mm, and the balance stuck out to the rear. They looked to be at least 25mm thick in total. With these amazingly strong glasses on her face every waking moment it was no wonder that I could not see the evidence of her wearing contact lenses, as her eyes were minified to pinpricks. A year after we were married we both went back for our annual vision exam. Vivian was already at the age where, in any normal myope, their progression should be slowing down, if not stopping completely, so it was a bit of a surprise to me when Vivian required an increase of another -2.50D. She had not complained to me that she could not see very well, but since both of us were working at a job that required being always at a very close distance to our coding I suppose that she had not noticed her eyesight gradually getting worse over the past year. This time the optician would not let her order her new glasses in anything less than 1.74 index plastic, and actually suggested that she should get 1.9 index glass myodiscs. But Vivian wasn’t interested in the glass lenses and she finally ordered the 1.74 index lenses in a similar frame to the one she already wore. When her new glasses came in, with their now OD -25.00 x - 5.00 x 88 and OS – 25.00 x -5.00 x 95 prescription it was hard to tell the difference between her old glasses and her new ones. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to have to wear such strong looking glasses, but it still fascinated me to look lovingly at Vivian and see her wearing them so proudly. Our vision exam the following year showed a slight slowing down in Vivian’s myopic progression. She only required an increase of -2.00D for both eyes and her astigmatism stayed about the same. The doctor had suggested the previous year that with her increase in astigmatism that she might be developing a case of keratoconus, which is actually a very serious problem, but his exam this year found that her astigmatism was still the same -5.00D in both eyes and was at the same angles it had always been. We were both quite relieved to hear that. I had been promoted to a supervisor at our workplace, so I no longer was hunched over my coding. But now as I walked around checking on, and assisting anyone who needed help, I could see how close Vivian had to be to her work to see with her now -27D glasses. She had the font size set to very large on her computer monitor, but when she was typing I could see her nose was only about 4 or 5 inches away from the keyboard on her computer. I was quite worried that she was going to make herself go blind if she kept up this pace, and while she did a perfect job and she loved her work I decided that I should do my best to talk her into quitting so that we could have a baby. It took me a bit of talking before I finally convinced Vivian to go off birth control. She was not willing to give up her job until after she was pregnant so I did go along with that. I got myself in trouble while I was trying to convince her to quit early, as I had videoed her working on her computer with her nose about 5 inches away from the keyboard and her rather ample breasts crushed into the desk. I guess she had not realized how much like a blind person she looked, and it did not help my husband status to bring this up. But after this blew over she had been off the pill for long enough that we would start working on having a baby. Vivian was about 6 months along when it was time for our annual eye exam. She had been complaining that she needed new glasses for about a month before this but had agreed that she should wait for the annual exam. My prescription remained the same, but this time Vivian blew past the -30D mark. Her new prescription was OD -31.00 x -6.50 x 88 and OS -31.00 x -6.50 x 95. What surprised me was that she was ecstatic about the fact that she had passed the -30D mark and she told me that this had been her goal all along. Apparently a prescription that is higher than -30 gets some sort of “Oh Wow” from people in the eyecare industry. After our daughter was born Vivian was more than willing to stay home and look after her. Our next vision exam was just before the baby was 6 months old and the doctor had told Vivian that she might experience a little further increase when she finished breast feeding. But at this point Vivian’s -31D glasses were still satisfactory. We plan to have another child, even though the possibility is there for a further increase in Vivian’s prescription. But Vivian doesn’t seem to care if her eyes get any worse, and I am still fascinated with her glasses. Specs4ever August 2016