This is my first story, so please be nice to me. Bits of it are based on my actual road to full time wear.
It took Harry a long time to finally accept that he needed to start wearing his glasses all of the time, and he had several ‘false starts’ at full time wear before he actually started full time wear. He first noticed he was having trouble reading the board at school when towards the end of Year 9 (aged about 14). He told his mum who said she’d book him an opticians appointment during the summer holidays. As he didn’t really want glasses, he wasn’t that bothered about her putting it off. However, his mum noticed him having difficulty reading the boards at the airport when they were going on holiday so she said to him ‘That reminds me, I need to book you an opticians appointment when we get home’. He wasn’t keen on going for the eye test, but he did know that getting glasses would help. When the optician had finished testing his eyes, he said ‘You must have had difficulty seeing the board at school for a while now, I’m surprised you haven’t got glasses before’. Harry admitted he’d been struggling for a few months, but wasn’t keen on wearing glasses. He asked the optician if he had to wear glasses all of the time. The optician said ‘You definitely need to wear them for distance but it makes sense for you to wear them all the time for two reasons. Firstly, you will get used to wearing glasses more quickly if you are not taking them on and off the whole time. Secondly, at your age you will continue to grow and you eyes will get worse so you will need stronger glasses, and you’ll find as your eyes get worse you will soon need them all the time, anyway’. He then took him outside to choose some frames. The optician told Harry’s mum that he was short sighted and needed glasses for distance, and that he would need another check up in a year’s time. The dispenser was very helpful and helped Harry to choose some frames. He didn’t get the cheapest frames in the store, but he didn’t get the designer ones either, because he was not sure how often he was going to wear them.
A few days later when Harry went to collect them his mum sat in the waiting room bit of the opticians when he went to have the frames fitted. After the dispenser had adjusted them she asked him if he wanted to keep them on, Harry said something about getting used to them at home, so she put them in the case and gave him them. By now it was the last few days of the summer holidays. he was anxious about wearing his new glasses to school but also figured that the optician was probably right; the best thing to do was to put them on and forget about it. So the next day, he decided he would try to wear his glasses for the whole day to get used to them. His mum had gone to work by the time he got up but she had left him a list of things to do. One of the things was to go to town to get his bus pass for the new term. When he got to the bus company office and handed over his photo card and renewal form, the lady behind the counter said ‘Do you want to update your photo card too, your appearance has changed quite a bit’ . He said he didn’t but her comment made him feel very aware of the new glasses. However, the previous photo was three years old and like all adolescents his face had lost some of its ‘babyface’-appearance and he’d changed his hairstyle, so it was probably as much to do with that as the glasses. By the time his mum came home from work he’d had the glasses on for about 8 hours. When she saw him she said ‘Try not to wear your glasses too much, it will make you dependent on them’, so he took them off. Things certainly seemed blurry without them, but looking back he know that his eyes were just getting used to the new vision. Every time his mum saw him in his glasses, she reminded him that the optician had said they were for ‘distance’. He didn’t want to tell his mum that the optician had said he could wear them all the time. A few days later, at dinner time his mum told him to take his glasses off because looking at a plate was not ‘distance’. At that point, Harry put his glasses in a draw in his bedroom and forgot about them altogether. Over the year, things got harder at school but he coped by moving nearer the front of the classroom and by copying notes off his friends.
When the reminder letter came a year later, he threw it straight in the bin because he never wore his glasses. So, he was quite surprised one evening a week or two later when his mum told him that she’d booked him an opticians appointment for the following Saturday. For some reason his mum who had moaned at him for wearing his glasses insisted that he wore them for his check up. When the optician called Harry into the consulting room he said that he was not surprised that Harry was wearing his glasses all the time. Harry didn’t bother to tell the optician it was the first time he had worn them in over a year. At the end of the test the optician told Harry that his eyes had got worse and he also suggested he got a new pair so that he could keep the original pair as a ‘spare’ in case anything happened to his glasses. When they met his mum outside the testing room the opticians told her his eyes had got worse that he should get new frames so that he had a back up pair. The dispenser said to Harry ‘Put your glasses on the table over there, let’s go and choose some new frames’. He chose a pair that were fairly similar to the previous pair. Once the dispenser had finished sorting out the new pair of glasses, she gave Harry his own pair back which he put on while his mum went to pay for the new glasses. However, as soon as Harry got home he took the glasses off and put them back in the drawer.
The next weekend it was Harry’s weekend to stay with his dad. His mum told Harry’s dad that he needed to take him into town on Saturday afternoon to pick up some new glasses. Harry was a bit nervous when he went into the opticians, he still wasn’t keen on the idea of wearing glasses, but knew his eyes were quite bad now. His dad came with him to the desk to get the new frames fitted. As before, the dispenser took them out of the case to show him, put them on and got him to look in the mirror and then adjusted the fit. She then asked Harry whether he was going to keep them on. Possibly because of the comments he’d got from his mum about wearing his glasses too much, Harry asked his dad what he thought. His dad was much more laid back about this and told Harry it was up to him. In the end Harry decided to keep the glasses on and left the opticians wearing them. It was raining when he went outside and Harry was annoyed by the spots of rain on his new glasses. When he got back to the car he took his glasses off to dry them; even after just a few minutes wear things seemed blurry without them. He was quite happy wearing his glasses around his dad and kept them on all weekend. However, he was anxious about wearing them around his mum and before they got in the car for his dad to take him home, he put his glasses back in the case.
When he got home, his mum asked to see his new glasses, so he got them out of the case and put them on again. Harry liked being able to see but his mum made a comment along the lines of ‘I hope you are going to actually wear this pair’. This made Harry anxious about wearing his glasses again. So, he put them back in the draw with the other pair. For a few months he carried on not wearing them much at all, except very occasionally at home. However, at some point that year one of his teachers kept him behind and said she thought he needed to get glasses. He had to admit that he had them. From that point, he had to bring his glasses in to school and wear them in some lessons. The first time he got them out and put them on in school he felt as if everybody was looking at him. Most of the class didn’t even notice. His school friends were not that surprised to see him wearing glasses, because it was clear to them he had problems seeing the board and he would often end up copying from them in classes when he wasn’t at the very front of the room. However, he didn’t wear them for anything other than copying from the screen and he would take them off as soon as he had done so. In the summer in his sports lessons Harry’s class played cricket, which he hated, so he tried to stand at the edge of the field, hoping that the ball wouldn’t come in his direction, The first afternoon they played it, he couldn’t see the ball at all, so he did start to wear his glasses for his games lessons, too.
It was about 18 months before he went for his next eye test. By now he was doing his A levels. His economics teacher used the board a lot for diagrams and it difficult to see them clearly even when he was wearing his glasses, so he plucked up the courage to ask his mum to book him an appointment. Because he was now 17, he could go for the test by himself, so she had booked him an appointment after school one night. It was a different optician who did the test this time. She was quite surprised when he told her only really wore his glasses for the board at school. She did the test and his eyes had got worse again. At the end of the exam she asked if he’d got his current glasses and she told him to put them on. When he did so he could read about two thirds of the chart, she then held some lenses in front of his existing glasses and said that was how it would be once he got his new glasses. She then gave him some fairly clear instructions; ‘You vision without glasses is not good enough for most things now, you really must start wearing your glasses all the time. I would suggest that you start by wearing your old glasses for now while you wait for your new ones to come in’. His mum had asked him to pay for his glasses on his card and said she would pay him back for them, so after the test he spent some time choosing his new frames. Despite the lecture by the optician he wasn’t convinced that he would actually wear his glasses all the time, so he still kept clear of the designer frames, but he did go for some mid-range frames.
For the next week, Harry continued only to wear his glasses when he needed to see the board at school. It was a Tuesday night when he went to collect the new glasses. Because he wasn’t wearing his old frames, he didn’t notice that the optician was behind the counter, as well as the receptionist. It was the optician who did the collection. She very carefully managed the collection process. She said to her colleague that ‘Harry had come to collect his new full time glasses’. When she sat him down at the table she took the frames out of the case and put them on to check his vision. She then handed him a mirror so he could see how he looked. She then adjusted them behind his ears and when she was happy with the fit she said something like ‘they are a really good fit, you’ll soon get used to wearing them all the time’. Rather than asking him if he wanted to keep them on she said ‘I’ll just give the lenses a quick polish so that you don’t have to look at smudges on your way home’. Having cleaned the lenses, she put the glasses straight back on Harry’s face and then put the case in a small carrier bag and handed it to him. There was no opportunity for him to take the glasses off. Harry wasn’t that bothered because his anxieties about wearing glasses were mainly around his family. His mum was away for a few days, so he was in the house by himself. He happily wore his glasses all evening before going to bed. For the next two days he worse his glasses all the time. He did get a few comments at school but it wasn’t a big deal, most of his friends were used to seeing him wearing glasses. On Friday, his mum was going to be back from her trip, so when he was walking home from the bus stop he took his glasses off and put them back in his pocket. For the next year or so, he would wear his glasses in class but not much else.
In June just after he had taken his A levels, Harry realised that he was going to have to start wearing glasses full time. He had been into town and getting on the bus back home he waved to someone and committed to sitting next to them before realising they weren’t who he thought they were. He sheepishly apologised and said he couldn’t see properly because he’d forgotten his glasses. When he got home he phoned up to make an opticians appointment. They were able to see him the following day. When his mum came home from work that night, Harry told her about the incident on the bus and said that he’d booked an appointment to get new glasses that he was actually going to wear. The following day Harry put on his glasses before his trip into town to go to the opticians. He didn’t want to embarrass himself on the bus again. When he got into the consulting room and the optician removed his glasses he was shocked to realise that he could barely manage to read the big letter at the top of the chart without his glasses. The test confirmed that his eyes had got worse, and although the rate of increase in myopia had slowed down he’s got much more astigmatism. One the test was over, he had to choose his new frames. This time knowing that he would be wearing his glasses all the time, he decided to get a pair of Ray Ban wayfarer frames and had an antireflection coating on his lenses. Whilst he didn’t wear his old glasses full time for the next few days, he made sure that he always had them with him.
When Harry got the call to say his new glasses had arrived, it was the first time he was excited to go and pick them up. He had his old frames on when he went into the opticians. When he got to the dispenser’s table she looked at his card and said ‘Your astigmatism has changed quite a bit, so it might take a while to adjust to your new glasses’. When she got them out of the case and put them on, Harry could see clearly but things felt a bit weird. After she had finished adjusting the glasses, she said to Harry, ‘I would wear your old glasses for the rest of the day and put these ones on first thing tomorrow, it will be easier to adapt to them that way’. The following day Harry became a full time glasses wearer. As soon as he was dressed he put on his new glasses. Although he was spending most of the day at home doing nothing, that evening was his end of school prom, and he was determined to wear them his new glasses the prom. Whenever anybody suggested that he started wearing his glasses, he’d always said he could see well enough without them, so he knew that he’d get a few comments about the fact he was actually wearing glasses. He realised it was something he would just have to put up with for a little while because he also knew he’d find the whole thing much more enjoyable if he could see properly. When he got dressed for the prom, he didn’t even think twice about putting the glasses back on, After a whole day wearing them, things seemed really blurry without them. Before he set off to meet his friends, Harry’s mum wanted to take some pictures of him in his new suit. In a sign that he’d accepted myself as a full time wearer he kept his glasses on for the photos. Walking round to his friend’s house he did feel a bit aware of his new glasses, but he wasn’t bothered by them. He did get a few comments from his friends about his new glasses, but he was more annoyed by the fact that several of them wanted to try his glasses on and the ‘No wonder you are wearing glasses now, you’re blind’-type remarks when they did so. Within about half an hour everybody had seen him in glasses and the remarks has stopped and Harry was just enjoying being able to see clearly for the first time in years. By the end of the evening he’d almost forgotten that he was wearing glasses and given the number of pictures taken by the end of the evening he’d seen so many photos of himself he was getting quite used to the way he looked.
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