You can never have too many back-ups. This is perfectly illustrated by the following episode which happened to my wife a good few years after we were married. But first, a bit of background to this wonderful lady.
I married a very myopic girl without even realising she was so short-sighted when I first dated her. “Glasses Moments 6 – Finding Miss Right” describes that time. I now know that when I first met her she was L -8.50, R -8.00, and wore contact lenses. She didn’t even have a back-up pair of glasses except for an old weak pair from when she was 19. She just never bothered. To her, poor eyesight was a disability and something she was born with. She had no interest in her condition whatsoever, and just accepted it as a part of normal life. The regime of putting lenses in, taking them out, and cleaning them was as mundane a task as washing and eating. Just something else you had to do daily. And if you ever approached the subject of her eyesight, she immediately got defensive and said not to discuss someone’s disability. I used to watch her coming from the bathroom at night having removed her lenses, and feeling her way to the bed with her arms outstretched touching the furniture. It gave me a strange buzz, and even a bigger one when I knew that the girl lying beside me was virtually blind at that moment. Strange how the mind works. And then in the morning, it was a repeat procedure, with the first task being to put her lenses in. Sometimes, if we were having a lie-in on a Saturday, there would be a knock at the door at 9 am with a delivery she was expecting, but it was me who had to get up and answer it. “I can’t,” she’d say, “I don’t have my eyes in!” And if I suggested getting back-up glasses, I was shouted down. “Waste of money – I don’t need them. We need to keep our cash for things the kids need,” she would say. She wouldn’t even go for regular eye tests, and I did suspect that when our two children were born her sight actually got worse. The telltale signs were there – squinting, moving nearer the TV, reading closer to her face, but you just couldn’t tell her. Taboo subject! However, the following episode was to change all that.
We were on holiday one year somewhere in England in a rented cottage, and everything was fine until one morning. Disaster! She had got up, went into the bathroom to put her lenses in while I snoozed a bit more, and then I was rudely awakened with a loud shriek. I thought she’d electrocuted herself, or scalded herself, or even worse – seen a mouse! I leapt out of bed, rushed through, and there she was standing in the bathroom with her little contact lens container open in her hand. She put it up to her nose to look at it and said, “Look. LOOK! See what’s happened! It’s broken! It’s in two parts! Look!” “Let me see,” I said, trying to calm her down. “You’re right, it’s broken in two.” Her left lens was in two parts. “It mustn’t have been sitting right when I screwed the cap on,” she said. “Oh God, what am I going to do? This is terrible! I can’t operate without them” “You’ll just have to wear one,” I said. That didn’t go down too well. “No way,” she said, “I’ll get a headache in minutes. No way.” “Well, we’ll have to go into the town and find an optician,” I suggested. I had to make the breakfast, then help her find something to wear and stand with her while she dressed. Then I had to guide her out to the car while all the time she moaned and complained. I was starting to see the funny side of it, but she certainly wasn’t! All the way into the town all I got was, “Oh, this is terrible. Awful! I can’t see a thing. Hurry up and get us there.”
We found a 4 hour optician and as it was 10 o’clock in the morning on a weekday, they managed to give her an eye test immediately. They said they couldn’t do contact lenses in four hours. That would take a few days, but they could do glasses with single vision lenses in four hours, so we browsed the frames. She couldn’t really see what she was doing, so it was left to me to choose something. She said to keep the price down, so I chose a pair of very fashionable (1980s) oversize plastic frames in flesh/pink colour which looked very good, and dare I say it, sexy on her. There was a second pair from a limited range included free with the deal, so I chose a pair of dropped temple frames in clear/light blue plastic.
We were told to come back in four hours, so I had the pleasant job of guiding her around the town while we walked down by the riverside, took the kids to a play park, and then went for lunch to an American-style burger bar. She did start to discuss her sight and said she had no idea she was as bad as that. She had never gone without contacts outside – ever! She was actually quite amazed. She kept asking if people were looking at her and saying they would think she was blind. I just said, “Keep holding on to me!”
We eventually got back to the optician’s and the glasses were ready. She tried them on, and the girl made a few adjustments to them. She was amazed at how clear everything was – even clearer than with her contacts she said. It was obvious she was long overdue an eye test. One thing I did notice on the dropped temple pair was that the left lens had a plano front on it, and it was really thick. She didn’t wear these ones very often, but when she did it was magical to see the light reflecting off the whole lens surface when she turned her head.
The rest of the holiday went well, and I was especially attracted to my new bespectacled lady all over again. It was wonderful. This is Lynne in her new glasses. (I took loads of photos!)
When we got home, she went to get fitted for new contact lenses. The glasses were now used when she needed “instant sight” as she called it, or when her lenses were irritating her which happened quite often. Probably because they were still hard lenses. Also, she would now prefer to put her glasses on as soon as she woke up, and sometimes, especially at weekends, she would wear them all day.
A good few years later, I noticed she was having increasing trouble reading, and was holding the paper further and further away from her. She was getting quite annoyed by this as she said she could read fine in bed without contact lenses, albeit with the book right up at her nose. Another trip to the optician was arranged, and she was prescribed reading glasses to wear over her contacts. She became totally dependent on them and went everywhere with them on a cord around her neck. I liked this. I had my “glasses girl” back again!
By now, I had varifocals, and she saw how well I liked them. She asked if we could go back to the optician and get her a pair as she was getting fed up with fussing about with reading glasses and the time it took to look after her contacts. Now she was talking! I was even more excited than her when she went to collect them and we left the shop with my beautiful girl with glasses on my arm. I kept telling her how fabulous she looked in them, and how they made her so young looking (it always works!). Although they were high index lenses, they were still reasonably thick and had good visible power lines. Now, in recent visits to the optician, her prescription has gone down to -6.50 and -6.00 with the onset of presbyopia, but she is still my beautiful myopic princess.
https://vision-and-spex.com/glasses-moments-7-you-can-never-have-too-many-back-t569.html