Donna and I were married when she was 24 and I was 26. We had dated for a year or so before we were married and had decided early in our dating period that we liked each other a lot, and that we should get married. Donna was slim, with long brown hair and a nice petite figure and was a flight attendant for one of the major airlines. With our marriage came the perk of being able to fly for free – but only on standby. As a flight attendant Donna had to pass a stringent physical and vision exam, and although Donna had perfect vision when she was hired, by now the airlines had changed their requirements enough so that people with small amounts of required correction could work for them
No one in Donna’s family wore glasses until they were old enough to requite reading glasses and my family was the same except for my brother who was slightly myopic, but he very seldom wore his glasses except to drive. If I remember correctly his myopia was so mild that he did not have his license restricted, but he did like to wear them when driving, especially at night. So our families did not have a history of vision problems.
A year after we were married Donna had to go for a physical, and her doctor discovered that her blood pressure was a little high. He had her come back a few times so he could monitor it, and Donna eliminated salt and caffeine from her diet. However, even with more exercise her blood pressure remained stubbornly higher than the doctor felt acceptable for someone her age. With that, he reluctantly prescribed a low dose of a fairly common blood pressure medication. A month later her blood pressure still hadn’t dropped to an acceptable level, so the doctor increased her medication and that seemed to do the trick.
Donna had been taking the medication for about 2 years when she became pregnant. We wanted to have at least 4 children so we were both thrilled with the pregnancy. Both our parents were ecstatic as well, because they both wanted grandchildren. The pregnancy went well with one little hitch. In her 6th month Donna noticed that her vision seemed to have deteriorated a lot, and she was finding that she had become quite nearsighted. Her obstetrician didn’t seem to be too worried about it, told her that this was fairly common, and that he expected that her eyesight would return to normal after the baby was born, but if it didn’t come back then it would certainly return to normal after she was finished breastfeeding the baby.
Donna found it quite inconvenient to be a little nearsighted. At first she squinted at everything trying to see it clearly, but after a while she gave up and just asked me what something said if she wanted to know what it was, or what it said. It was then that I noticed that unless Donna was reading or looking at something very close to her she seemed to have a vacant, unseeing look in her eyes. It is hard to explain, but it seemed that she just didn’t bother to try to focus anymore.
After Kaitlyn was born she waited for a few weeks, hoping that her vision would return as suddenly as it disappeared. Finally, after another month of not being able to see properly when she took Kaitlyn in for her checkup she mentioned that her vision was still extremely poor. So the doctor checked her eyesight with his eye chart at the end of the hall of his office, and he was surprised when Donna couldn’t even make out the big E. He then referred Donna to a local Ophthalmologist.
I took the day off work to drive Donna to the eye doctor’s office. It was raining anyway and the construction site where I was working would have been a puddle of mud. I went in and I sat there while the doctor examined Donna’s eyes. When she came out with the doctor I had to go over and take her hand because I knew that she could not have seen me sitting there.
“So what is the verdict doctor?” I asked.
“Your wife has become extremely nearsighted. She tells me that it is because of being pregnant, and I have to believe it, but her prescription is far stronger than I have ever seen a new mother develop from the birth of a child.”
“Will glasses help, and can she get them?” I asked.
“Oh, she most certainly needs glasses. Her eyesight will be almost normal with glasses. It’s just that I have never seen a new mother who has never needed glasses before with a prescription of over -7D of myopia due to having a child. I have seen a large number of young mothers with a -1.50 or a -2.00D increase, but this is the largest jump in childbirth myopia I have ever seen.
The doctor gave us the prescription he had written, and since he didn’t sell glasses we went to a one hour place in the mall. We selected a nice frame that I liked the looks of on Donna and while we waited we went to the food court for something to eat. I was pretty ambivalent about the fact that Donna would need to wear glasses. I had never had any experience with a glasses wearer, but I didn’t mind the looks of glasses on a person, so I hoped that I would like how Donna looked wearing her new glasses. Donna, on the other hand, was pretty upset because she felt that her prescription and her glasses could create a problem with her being able to return to work.
We killed a little more than an hour sitting in the food court eating and talking. This was the first time we had been alone since Kaitlyn had been born and it was nice just spending some time with my wife. Finally we walked back to the optical store, and Donna’s glasses were ready. The lady optician fitted her glasses to her face, and when we were finished and were walking out of the store Donna was thrilled with her new found eyesight. We had not gotten the extra thin lens option that the optician had tried to push on us and I was surprised at the thickness of the lens that stuck out behind the frame. Also the front of her lenses seemed to be almost flat. I had never noticed this before in a pair of glasses – or if I had I never paid any attention to it. But in my wife’s case I was enthralled with the way the reflections danced off the flat front of her lenses.
By the time Kaitlyn was a year old Donna was already a month into her second pregnancy. We had decided that it would be better for the kids to be born fairly close together and we hadn’t wasted any time. Donna’s mom Lindsay was watching Kaitlyn much of the time and was helping out in a big way. It came as a surprise when Lindsay told Donna and me that it seemed to her that Kaitlyn couldn’t see properly. We were a little surprised, but we had noticed that Kaitlyn didn’t want to crawl anywhere, nor did she seem to want to try to walk. We had just started to wonder about this when Lindsay bought up the subject.
With that we had our pediatrician check out Kaitlyn and he made an appointment with a pediatric ophthalmologist. Kaitlyn tested to be extremely myopic, and her doctor suggested that her initial prescription should be -19D. It is very difficult to check the prescription in a baby, and the doctor told us that while he thought that Kaitlyn might need a stronger prescription he would rather start with a lower prescription that would allow her to see and identify most objects at a distance that was comfortable for her. Once we got her glasses Kaitlyn would struggle at first when we put them on, but she soon learned that this contraption we were making her wear on her face helped her see things.
I wondered at the time if this was a genetic type problem, and if it was would our second baby have the same problem. But I tossed that thought aside because our families did not have anyone with such severe vision loss as Kaitlyn had.
Donna was only about 4 months into her pregnancy when she started to notice that her eyesight was deteriorating again. So I asked her if she wanted to wait until after the baby was born to get new glasses, but she told me that there was no way she was going to go around in a blur for the next 5 or 6 months and since she already wore glasses she might as well get stronger ones. When she had her eyes examined the doctor discovered that her myopia had increased by -1.50D and now her new glasses were going to be -9.00D.
Donna’s lenses were a little thicker than her old ones, but her glasses still looked very nice on her and I didn’t mind the extra thickness at all. I was starting to like the looks of my wife when she was wearing her glasses. I didn’t really want her to have even thicker glasses that needed lenses that were dished in on the front like Kaitlyn wore and I would have been very satisfied if Donna wore these lenses for the rest of her life.
But this was not to happen. Just before Donna was ready to give birth she decided that she couldn’t put up with the blur that she was again experiencing and we were ready to go back to the eye doctor again. However, before we had a chance to do that she went into labor, and our son Ben was born a couple of weeks early. So Donna didn’t have a chance to get new glasses until Ben was around 5 or 6 weeks old.
Her eye doctor was surprised to find that Donna had experienced another deterioration of -2.50D in such a short period of time. He really could not explain this, and all he could tell us was that this was highly unusual. He did say that he had heard of some mothers experiencing something like this, but he had never had it happen to any of his patients.
That really didn’t reassure us, but we didn’t have any choice. Donna really needed new glasses, so this time we bought new frames and lenses for her. I convinced her that maybe we should spend the extra money for the thinner lenses and when we picked up her new -11.50D glasses I was glad that we had spent the money. Her new glasses looked extremely nice on her face.
By now Kaitlyn had worn her glasses for about a year. She was a cute, very active 2 year old, and she seemed to see fairly well when she was wearing her glasses but her doctor had suggested that we bring her back in a year and it was now time for the appointment. When her eyes were tested the doctor was satisfied that now he had been able to get a good reading of Kaitlyn’s severe myopia. Her proper prescription was going to be a little stronger at -21.50D for both eyes. So we got Kaitlyn another new pair of glasses and she was really a lot happier because she could now see a lot further distances than she could with her previous glasses.
Ben was around 6 months old when I started to notice that his eyes didn’t seem to have much life in them. They had the same vacant unfocused appearance that Donna and Kaitlyn had before they got their glasses. So we took Ben to the same pediatric ophthalmologist that had seen Kaitlyn, and he confirmed that Ben was also very nearsighted. Apparently it is even harder to examine a 6 month old child than it is to do a 1 year old. And, it is next to impossible to get a 6 month old baby to wear glasses. Fortunately we were able to find a harness type affair that would hold the glasses on Ben’s face, and soon he reached a point where he began to realize that he couldn’t see without the glasses so he stopped trying to fight them.
We had gotten Kaitlyn 2 pairs of glasses when she had her last exam, and I was the one who cleaned her lenses most of the time. Even Donna had a hard time telling if her glasses were clean, and she would have to take them off, clean them and then put them back on to see if she could see anything remaining on the lens, so with a much stronger prescription Kaitlyn was even worse off. With Ben, it didn’t seem to matter a lot, as his glasses were always smudged. I still tried to keep them as clean as I could though.
Donna and I were rethinking our idea to have 4 kids. Now that we had 2 very nearsighted children we were worried that any other children we had might have the same vision problems. We should have made the decision a little sooner though because Donna ended up being pregnant again. This time Donna needed her first increase in her prescription after about 3 months and her new glasses were -13.00D. This was only a -1.50D increase, but we were pretty sure that other increases were coming. So we didn’t buy Donna the high index lenses and her new glasses were a whole lot thicker this time. But they still weren’t as thick as the next pair she needed when she was 6 months pregnant. Her next glasses jumped by another -2D and her glasses were then so thick that they had to smooth off the outer edges so that the temples would fold and she could put the glasses in a case. Even so the lenses stuck out in front of the frame a bit, and if the temples on the glasses hadn’t been set well back a lot more would have needed to have been shaved off.
Ben had been about 9 months old when Donna got pregnant again. When she went in for her eye exam we also took Ben to see his eye doctor the same day, and the doctor was able to fine tune Ben’s prescription a little bit. His prescription at one year of age was similar to what Kaitlyn had required, and now we had a new pair of glasses with cable temples that were a lot easier to take on and off than the harness that had been strapped to his head. But we didn’t throw the harness away, because we were afraid we might need it for out third child.
By the time Donna reached full term she needed another -2.00D increase in her prescription and her now -17D lenses had a much wider ring around the side where the edge of the lens had been shaved off. She had debated waiting until after the baby was born before she got her new glasses, but she felt that she didn’t want to go around in a myopic blur until she was able to get out and have her eyes examined.
Donna’s prescription now was only about -2D lower than the prescription in Ben’s glasses so she had a very good idea of how and what our children could see, both with and without their glasses. She didn’t like the fact that she had developed so much myopia during childbirth, and she liked it even less that we had 2, and maybe 3, highly myopic children. She spent a lot of time worrying about their future, and wondering why this had happened.
Sure enough, by the time Amy was 6 months old we could see the same blank vacant unfocused look in her eyes as the other kids had. Naturally we took her to see the doctor as well, and the doctor suggested after examining Amy that we could likely use the same harness and lenses that we had for Ben until Amy was about a year. We the placed the harness on Amy, and she did become a much more active baby. At the same time we had Amy’s eyes checked Kaitlyn was also due another yearly exam, and it was discovered that her myopia had jumped by another -3.00D to -24.50D.
After the birth of Amy we made sure that another pregnancy would not happen. And when Amy was 2, Donna went back to work. We had speculated that the airline would find her poor eyesight a reason to not give her the job back, but there were enough regulations in place that the company would have been forced to either declare her as disabled, which would have cost them on their insurance premiums, or else pay her a fairly good settlement as a buyout. However they surprised us by offering Donna a position on the front counter, where she now checked passengers and luggage in. The money wasn’t quite as good as it had been when she worked as a flight attendant, but the additional money coming in sure helped the family budget.
For some reason or another Donna seemed to require an increase in her prescription every year and by the time Kaitlyn was 5 Donna had a prescription of -20D. But Kaitlyn’s prescription had jumped considerably as well and by her 5th birthday was wearing a prescription of -28.50D. She was a very happy kid and really enjoyed life but we were disappointed that she had such poor eyesight.
Fortunately Kaitlyn seemed to stop having increases after she turned 5. Ben, who was now 6, had his prescription climb to -28D when he was 5, and he had not required an increase that year, Amy had just reached her 5th birthday, and her prescription was right around that of her brother and her older sisters. All 3 kids wore almost identical brown frames with biconcave myodiscs. They all had a significant biconcave indentation in the front of their lenses and the rear of their lenses had 30 mm myodisc circles set in a plus carrier.
Unfortunately Donna had her vision deteriorate further each year, and by now she was wearing similar myodiscs to the 3 kids for her -24.00D prescription. We were spending a lot of time visiting specialists in high myopia to see if there was anything that could be done for Donna and the 3 kids, but no once could give us any explanation. The doctors were concerned that Donna and the kids might be susceptible to retinal detachments, so every visit to the eye doctor found them having retinal exams. There were no signs of possible detachments, and all the doctors seemed to feel that Donna and the kids actually had pretty good eyesight when you took the amount of their required myopia correction into account. Donna did still have her driver’s licenses, and her eye doctor had told her that she had good enough vision to continue driving, although she didn’t do very much driving.
Another 3 years went by and the three children had all seemingly settled down with prescriptions that were all around -28D. Kaitlyn still had -28.50D for both eyes, Ben had -28.00D, and Amy had the strongest prescription at -28.75D But Donna’s prescription had climbed up past -28D and she was at the doctor’s to have another eye exam when she noticed an article in one of the magazines in the rack. Apparently the article concerned a lady who was slightly myopic who had been taking a blood pressure medication that had made her very nearsighted. When Donna read this she realized that her myopia had started about 2 years after she began taking medication for her high blood pressure. The medication that the lady in the article had been taking was not the same one that Donna had been prescribed, but the article was enough to make Donna start thinking about it.
Donna told me about this, and together we began to investigate the medication that Donna was taking. There were a lot of side effects, and most of the web sites that had the side effects listed all had the same ones. But Webdoctor.com had a much more in depth study of results and side effects on this medication and sure enough one of the side effects was listed as “May cause nearsightedness”. To the right of each side the seriousness of the side effect was given, and while most of the side effects had low, or medium this side effect was listed as severe.
We searched for the article online that Donna had read, and we contacted the eye doctor that had originally linked the other ladies increase in myopia to the drug she had been taking. We found out from him that the base for both drugs was exactly the same so he was not surprised to find that there were other victims. And when we told him that we now had 3 children who were also extremely myopic he was not surprised after he found out that Donna had been on this drug during all 3 pregnancies. His explanation was that if Donna had not gotten pregnant while she was on this drug she would probably not have developed any myopia herself. It was not the fact that she was on the drug that caused her myopia; it was the combination of the drug along with her pregnancy that caused the reaction. And, while she was pregnant the drug entered the children’s blood stream while they were in the womb. After the children were born the drug that remained in their blood caused their eyeballs to elongate considerably. Now that they were all over the age of 5, the drug was long gone from their system, but the severe myopia remained, and would stick with them for their entire life.
With this knowledge, and because of the fact that Donna’s eyesight still was getting worse we went back to her doctor and we found another blood pressure medication that after careful research was determined not to create more myopia. This medication did work to lower her blood pressure, and we hoped that this would be the end of her increases in her myopia. She had now reached a prescription of -30D, and her visual acuity was borderline 20/40.
Armed with all of our research, and with a couple of doctors seemingly willing to testify in our behalf we contacted an attorney. We filed suit against the drug company and after another 2 years managed to negotiate a settlement that was reasonably fair. We had 2 noted pediatric ophthalmologists give depositions about the future problems that Donna and the 3 children were bound to face. And even though none of the problems had shown up yet the chances were that all 4 of them could end up legally blind.
Now we have the answer to why my wife and my 3 children are so very nearsighted. If any of you are prescribed medication for any medical conditions please make sure that you double check the side effects very carefully. Unless you are one of those who have a desire to be nearsighted be very careful of anything that tells you “May cause nearsightedness”.
Specs4ever Jan 2013
https://vision-and-spex.com/may-cause-nearsightedness-t402.html