My name is Jessie Wilson and I was 10 years old when I got my first pair of glasses. My parent’s both wear glasses, so they were not terribly surprised when I complained that I could not see things clearly across the street. My mom took me to the eye doctor that they both use, and I got my first pair of glasses. I really liked the fact that these glasses made everything I looked at really nice and clear, but my mom wasn’t too happy that I needed glasses. She had gotten her glasses when she was around the same age as me, and now her glasses are somewhere around a number 16 or 17. Or maybe one eye is 16 something and the other eye is 17 – I am not really sure, because mom doesn’t like to talk about her eyesight other than to say it is really bad. Dad’s glasses are number 6, and apparently his eyes are a lot better than moms, but he never goes anywhere without his glasses on or his contacts in. And mom won’t go out of the house without her contacts. I don’t think her glasses look as awful as she always complains that they do, and I wouldn’t make as much of a fuss about them as she does if I had to wear them. When I was around 11, I had been wearing glasses for over a year. Now things didn’t look nearly as clear, and I told mom that, so she took me back to the eye doctor. My first pair of glasses had been a number 2, and now my new ones were going to have to be a number 3 lens. We got my new glasses, and I wore them for a month, but then mom took me back to see the eye doctor. The doctor had suggested something to her that he called okatherapy or something to make my eyes less nearsighted. Apparently, I had to wear these special contact lenses every night when I was sleeping and after a few months I might be able to see perfectly again without glasses. The doctor did all sorts of measuring of my eyes and he ordered me a pair of these Ortho K lenses. I didn’t want to wear contact lenses. I liked wearing my glasses. But nobody listened to me, and I ended up having to put these darned lenses in my eyes every night at bedtime. Then in the morning I could take them out and supposedly go to school without wearing my glasses. The stupid contact things hurt, too. The first morning I had them in when I woke up in the morning and mom helped me take them out and sanitize them, she asked me if I could see well without my glasses. I could see pretty good, but I lied and told her things still looked blurry. She wouldn’t let me put my new number 3 glasses on, but she let me wear my old number 2 ones to school. I took my new glasses to school with me and around first recess I switched to my new glasses. When I got home that night mom was upset that I was wearing my stronger glasses, but I told her that by lunchtime I just couldn’t see things clearly anymore. This went on for a couple of weeks. I was getting sick and tired of wearing these contacts overnight, and I started taking them out as soon as mom kissed me goodnight. Then in the morning I would make a bit of a production of taking them out and cleaning them, but I was faking it. When no improvement was seen in my vision after a month mom took me back to the eye doctor. He checked my eyes and told mom I still tested 20/20 with the number 3 glasses and he could not understand it because all of his other patients that he had tried this with all had perfect vision after a year. I knew what this meant. I was going to have to fake wearing these lenses for another year, because mom is stubborn like that. Now at night mom would come into kiss me goodnight and she would make sure I had my special lenses in my eyes. She also wanted to help me take them out in the morning again so sometimes I had to put them back in without her catching me and let her help me take them out again. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want my eyes fixed, as I really liked wearing glasses. Just because she hated glasses didn’t mean I did. My dad wore contact lenses that were a number 5.50. One day I took a pair from his box of new lenses and hid them away. I didn’t know if they would fit my eyes or not, but I was determined to try. I had put Dad’s glasses on a few times and with a little bit of effort I could see Ok with them on, so I figured I should be able to wear his contact lenses if they didn’t hurt my eyes. Finally, after a couple of weeks had gone by, I figured he wouldn’t miss the pair I had taken so I tried to put his contacts into my eyes. They didn’t hurt and when I blinked, they felt pretty comfortable, so that morning I went off to school wearing dad’s contacts and no glasses. Mom was happy because she thought that the special Ortho K lenses were finally working. I guess it took a couple of months before I got used to wearing dad’s contact lenses. It was a little harder to see with the contacts than it had been with his glasses, and at first, I had a bit of trouble focusing on what I was reading. By then I found I was able to put my number 2 glasses on over the contacts unless I was trying to read, so I started coming home from school wearing the number 2 glasses again. I did this for a few months and then when mom told me I had to go for my eye exam I discovered that even with my old number 3 glasses on I could not see very well. The doctor examined my eyes, and he was really surprised that my eyes had deteriorated so badly. Now I needed number 7 lenses in my new glasses. And the good news was that since the Ortho K had not worked mom and dad got most of their money back and I didn’t have to mess with the Ortho K lenses anymore. Now, at age 12 I had glasses that were stronger than my dads were. And I really liked them a lot because they looked thick enough that everyone could tell that I really needed them. Now that I was able to wear glasses again, I did everything I could to make my eyes gradually get worse. I read books – when I was in my room by myself – that I held so close to my nose that if I had held my book any closer, I would have had to close one eye. I also borrowed a pair or two of mom’s old glasses to wear whenever I could, but I didn’t like wearing them all that much. One pair was pretty good, but most of them had different prescriptions for each eye and they were hard to wear. But that one pair was really quite acceptable, and I wore them to school sometimes. Every year when I went to have my eyes tested, I would be given a new prescription. Most years I only managed an increase of around 1, but a couple of times I had 1.50. By the time I was 16 my glasses were number 12 for both lenses. Mom always bought me the thinnest lenses possible and my glasses never looked quite as thick as I really would have liked them to look, but I managed to keep my secret from coming out, even when she showed me how thick her glasses were when she was my age. I almost told her I wouldn’t have minded wearing them, but I wisely kept my mouth shut – even though I had worn them sometimes without her knowledge. The year I was 16 was the same year that mom turned 40. The years of contact lens wear had taken their toll on her eyes and she was having trouble wearing her contacts all day, every day. Her prescription was much stronger than the laser surgery thing was allowed to fix, but she could have contact lenses implanted in her eyes. Our eye doctor warned mom that the implantable contact lenses sometimes caused early cataracts to form, but since we were not exactly poor mom really wanted to have the surgery done. It was very successful, and now my mom no longer had to wear any form of eye correction. She was so happy with the fact that she no longer needed glasses that she and dad started a savings account to pay for my eye surgery when my eyesight finally stabilized. I thought it was prudent for me not to tell her that I had no great desire to rid myself of my glasses and I also felt like telling her to stop bugging me to get contacts. But again, I said nothing. Dad didn’t seem to have the same aversion to wearing glasses as mom had, and by this time he only wore his contacts for special occasions. I did manage to have a conversation with mom about glasses a couple of months after I turned 17. I had needed an increase of -1.50 and my new 13.50 glasses were a little thicker and rather noticeably stronger. When mom asked me again if I wanted to get contacts, I asked her why she hated glasses so much. After all, glasses or contacts had allowed her to see things clearly beyond the end of her nose for 29 years of her life. It was then that she told me of being teased a lot about having to wear glasses and as her glasses got thicker the teasing ended up being a bit nastier. She told me that she absolutely hated her glasses, and the best day of her life was when she got her first pair of contact lenses at age 15. I then told her that I had never been teased, not even a little bit. A lot of other kids in my grade at school also wore glasses and no one felt that there was any problem with being a glasses wearer. Some of the other girls had contacts, but they actually wore their glasses about as often as they wore their contacts. With that conversation I realized why my mom had wanted me to not have to wear glasses as badly as she had. But the era that I grew up in was a lot different than the era that she had gone through. I still didn’t have the heart to tell her that I had spiked the Ortho K trial, nor did I have the nerve to tell her that not only had I done whatever I possibly could do to make my eyesight worse there was no way I would ever spend the money in the special account to have lenses implanted in my eyes. I really doubt that she would have understood. Specs4ever Sept 2019
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