I am sooo mad! No, maybe I shouldn’t say mad. I am more like angry or upset. How could she do this to me? She knew I wanted to be able to wear glasses and now my best friend Cassandra Anderson has glasses and I don’t. I shouldn’t even talk to her anymore. But I guess that would be stupid because if I don’t stay friends with her then she won’t ever let me try her glasses on. My name is Kendra Mills and I am 10 years old. My best friend Cassie is the same age as me and we are both in Ms. Harris’s grade 5 class. I know Ms. Harris wears contact lenses because once she had to wear her glasses to school. She wears the cutest glasses and I love the looks of them. That are not very thick at the edges, but the front of the lenses are totally flat and they throw off really neat reflections. I told Cassie I wanted to wear glasses just like Ms. Harris wore when I got older and she never ever even told me that she wanted to wear glasses. Now she has glasses and I don’t. Today at school I got to try Cassie’s glasses on. I don’t understand why she needed to get glasses. I could see just as well when I had her glasses on as I can without them. But Cassie told me that her piano teacher saw that she couldn’t read the notes for the music and told her mom. Her mom had already noticed her squinting at things and getting closer to the television to watch her shows, so she made an appointment with Doctor Smith. Apparently Cassie can’t see the 2 bottom lines on the eyes chart that she is supposed to be able to see and that is why she needed to get glasses. And now, after only wearing her glasses for a day, when she takes them off she says that everything in the distance looks all blurry. I waited for a couple of weeks and then I told my mom that things in the distance were not as clear as they used to be. My mom made an appointment with Dr. Smith, and he checked my eyes and told mom that I did not need glasses yet. He said I should come back in 2 years. I was very disappointed and when I got back to my room I cried a little. Near the end of the summer, when Cassie and I were almost 11 and getting ready to go into grade 6, Cassie had to go back to Dr. Smith to have her eyes examined again. Apparently, according to Cassie, the new lenses in her glasses were twice as strong as her old ones had been. Now when I put them on I couldn’t simply see through them right away but after a few minutes I could see OK. She told me that the doctor told her that this was fairly normal to have to have a change in prescription within the first year. But for this to happen to me I first had to get my own glasses and I still didn’t have any idea how I could go about doing that. I spent some time looking things up on the internet about what Cassie had wrong with her eyes. She told me she was nearsighted, but I found that nearsighted or shortsighted was sort of slang for the proper word of myopia. With myopia the eyeball grows a little longer from front to back and the only way to correct this is to use a concave lens in front of the eye. The best thing I found out on the internet though was that prolonged reading and not being outside in the sunshine supposedly has contributed to the increase in myopia in children of school age. I also found that when a person was reading a lot, if they wanted to prevent myopia they needed to take frequent breaks and they should hold their book further away from their eyes. I didn’t want to prevent myopia, so I started doing everything they told me not to do. The closest I could get my book to my eyes and still read the words was about 4” so I tried reading as much as I could holding my book this close. Cassie and I both had our 11th birthdays. Cassie always put her glasses on every morning when she woke up, and she wore them all day until she went to bed. When I stayed over at her house she had a glasses case that she put them in on the table at the side of her bed. When she stayed at my house she would put her glasses face up on my dresser. She was very careful with her glasses and she told me that she would hate to break them and not have any glasses to wear because she really needed them to see. At times like this I almost hated my best friend, but I realized that this was not her fault and she really couldn’t help the fact that her eyes had become myopic when mine hadn’t. I think it was early in the spring that next year when I noticed that the trees looked like they were just green blobs until I got really close to them. This made me happy, because I seemed to me that all the close reading I had been doing might be working. I started to think I might be developing a little bit of myopia. Cassie had gotten the lenses changed in her first pair of glasses so I couldn’t ask her if I could try on the first prescription she had gotten. But she had recently gotten new glasses with even a stronger prescription. One afternoon after school I asked her if I could try her old glasses on, and she got them out of her dresser drawer and let me wear them. When I put them on I was amazed. Things were ever so clear again, and I told Cassie that. She told me I could borrow them if I wanted to, but I knew my mom would be upset with me if she caught me wearing Cassie’s old glasses. I knew the best thing I could do would be to just go home and tell mom and dad that I couldn’t see things clearly anymore. Cassie insisted I should take her old glasses and show my mom how much better I could see when I wore them. And finally I decided I would do that, but when I got home I chickened out. I did wear them that evening up in my room when I was reading though. The following day I decided I would wear Cassie’s old glasses in school, so I packed them in my back pack and put them on when I got to school. I wore them all day and when I took them off to go home I was shocked at how blurry everything looked without them. Now I knew I had to tell my parents, and that evening when I got home I told mom and dad that I had discovered that I couldn’t see that well anymore and that I had used Cassie’s old glasses at school that day. I told them it was amazing that when I had them on I could see everything clearly again. Mom tried to say that Doctor Smith had suggested that I would be fine for a couple of years, and that would be in December. Dad told her that we shouldn’t wait that long if my eyesight had started to become a little myopic, and finally she agreed to take me to see Doctor Smith. My dad asked me to stand 20 paces away from a calendar and he asked me to read the dates he pointed out. I could not see anything, so he got me to put Cassie’s glasses on and I could see every day that he pointed to. My dad then suggested that it would probably be all right if I wore Cassie’s old glasses to school until I got my own glasses from Doctor Smith. He even told my mom that it might even be better if I wore Cassie’s glasses until the end of summer before I had my eyes tested because he had a colleague at work whose daughter had recently gotten glasses and then within a few weeks she needed stronger lenses. Mom had one of her friends whose daughter had the same experience so she reluctantly agreed that they would wait a little while before she made an appointment. I didn’t care one way or another. I had Cassie’s old glasses and now I could wear them as much as I wanted to - which was every waking minute of every day. Now I could even wear Cassie’s newest glasses and my eyes seemed to see perfectly through the stronger lenses, but Cassie never let me wear them for very long because she said she couldn’t see clearly with her old glasses. Mom made me an appointment with Doctor Smith near the end of August. I had worn Cassie’s old glasses now for about 4 months and I hated to even take them off for a minute. Mom wanted me to take them off and leave them at home, but I made such a fuss about not wanting to go without them she finally decided to let me wear them and tell Doctor Smith the truth about why I was wearing glasses already. My own first glasses were ready for me that day. My prescription was a little stronger than the prescription in Cassie’s old glasses was and when I put them on I could feel them tug at my eyes a little bit. But within a short time they felt perfect and I could see everything ever so clearly. The girl that fit my new glasses had made them so they sat perfectly on my face and did not slip down at all and I liked that. I was willing to bet that if I had not worn Cassie’s glasses for as long as I had, my own prescription wouldn’t have been as strong as it ended up being, but I didn’t care. All I had wanted was to have my own glasses. I still wanted to have glasses with flat fronts to the lenses. My research on the Internet had indicated to me that this would happen when my prescription reached somewhere around -9D or maybe -10D. I had read a lot of stuff about inducing myopia, and about the consequences of having very high myopia so I figured I had better stop forcing my eyes to get worse myself and then I could see if they would get any worse on their own. I didn’t really want to have to wear what people called “coke bottle glasses” so I started to pull my books that I was reading away from the end of my nose. I was wearing glasses, and that is what I had wanted. The reading I had done on the Internet had told me that my myopia would likely increase on its own until I was in my early to mid 20’s. And if I got married and had children there was a possibility that my myopia would increase a little bit more then. The following year Cassie and I turned 13 and we both had to get stronger lenses. Cassie had not done anything to force her myopia to increase, and I really had stopped trying. But it did go up a little, and I suppose it was because we had entered puberty and we both were developing boobs. What was surprising to me was that my prescription was now a little bit stronger than Cassie’s. She was -4.00D and I was -4.50D, and while that was not a big difference it made it so that I could not see clearly with her glasses anymore. But Cassie could wear my glasses and she could see perfectly with them on. About 6 months went by and I realized that I could no longer see very well through my glasses. I had to tell my parents, and my mom didn’t believe me. But dad insisted that I should have another eye examination, so mom made an appointment for me and drove me to the doctors. My eyes required a rather big increase according to the doctor, and now my glasses were going to have to be -6.00D. I knew from what I had read on the internet that it was not all that unusual for girls to have prescription increases when they were in puberty, and I was most certainly at that point in my life. When I got my new glasses Cassie asked me if she could have my old ones because her own glasses seemed to be too weak, so I gave them to her and she thought her eyesight was better wearing them. No one else noticed because Cassie and I had gotten the same frame when we had bought our last glasses. I was a little worried that my eyes would keep on getting worse and worse. That is what I had read would happen on the Internet, and even though I didn’t really want my eyes to get any worse than Ms. Harris’s eyes I knew I had to prepare for that possibility. According to what I read on the Internet, once you start wearing glasses, the rate of progression is no longer in your hands. The Internet is a wonderful tool. It helped me when I wanted to get my first glasses by telling me what I needed to do to make my eyes need glasses. But in a way I had misused the Internet by me following along with what I had read there. I was just going to have to go along for the ride up the staircase of myopia, and see what happened with my eyesight in the future. Specs4ever July 2018.
https://vision-and-spex.com/kendra-and-the-internet-t1282.html