I met Tara when I was 21, and was in my second year at university. She was waiting tables at a restaurant that specialized in reasonably priced breakfasts and lunches where a lot of students hung out and I had started coming in every day for an early lunch. To me, Tara was an attractive girl. She was quite thin, and didn’t have a huge chest size, but her face was very pretty and she had nice chestnut brown hair which she wore tied back in a ponytail. She was fairly tall for a girl, and I guessed that she was about 5’9”, or maybe a little more. Her main attraction for me were her glasses as I had always liked the looks of a girl who wore glasses for as long as I could remember. Her glasses were what I would call cat eye glasses and the frame was a tortoiseshell colored plastic. The lenses had a substantial amount of power in them, but they were not what I would have considered really strong. I estimated that they were somewhere between -5D and -6D, depending on the index of the plastic that was used for them. I first started eating my lunch at the restaurant where Tara worked in mid-September. I spent almost 2 months chatting with Tara and I suppose I asked her for a date at least 20 times during this period. Finally in early November she agreed to go to a movie with me. This first date began a relationship that lasted about 2 years. During this time I graduated, and after I started working as a chemical engineer I asked Tara to marry me. She agreed, and we were married almost 2 years from the time we had our first date. Tara was almost 3 years younger than I was. While we dated she had lived by herself in a cheap rooming house that was fairly close to where she worked and she had not had much to do with her younger brother and sister or her parents, who lived in a rather plain bungalow in one of the suburbs of the city. I had questioned Tara about her relationship with her family, and finally, shortly before we were married, Tara confessed to me that she had gotten involved with drugs when she was back in high school. She had stolen money from her parents to buy drugs, and had put them through a rather nasty time. Eventually she had been arrested, and the judge had placed her on probation as long as she went to a rehab center. When she left the rehab center she was clean and she was smart enough to know that she had to get out of her old neighborhood and away from her old friends so that she would not relapse. When I first met her she had only been out of the rehab center and working at the restaurant for just a few weeks. I had never had the urge to try any form of drugs, so I really didn’t know much about cocaine or heroin use. By now though Tara had been clean for over 2 years and I figured that this would be the end of it. We had rented an apartment close enough for both of us to take public transit to work, and Tara continued working at the restaurant. We purchased most of our furnishings second hand, and together we stripped and refinished anything that was made of solid wood until we reached a point where our little one bedroom apartment was fairly cozy. My job was just far enough away that I could no longer go to the restaurant for lunch anymore, but I did go in with Tara in the morning and I had breakfast there. Things were going well and I was quite enjoying married life. I convinced Tara to have her eyes checked, which she did, and together we chose her a new frame for her slightly stronger lenses. Her prescription had increased very slightly and was now right at -7.50D. I had been off by about half a diopter in my original guess of her old glasses having a prescription of -6.00D as they had actually been -6.50D. I liked the fact that her prescription had increased slightly and I was quite fond of my wife wearing her new glasses. As a chemical engineer I had a job that paid fairly well. I also was studying ways to make chemicals easier on the environment and this was a field that was growing rapidly. I came up with some new processes that I was able to patent, and now my work was in demand. I had a bit of a falling out with the company I was working for as they felt that they should own the patents on the processes I had developed. But I could prove I had done all the work on these processes at home on my own time, so they realized that it would be a waste of money to sue me. However the work environment was a little tense, so I eventually gave my notice and started my own business as an environmental consultant. All this happened around the time of our second anniversary. And about the same time that this was all going down Tara discovered that she was pregnant. Our little one bedroom apartment was going to be pretty crowded with a baby around, but having just gone out on my own I had no proven income record for the bank to base a mortgage on. We were just going to have to tough it out, and somehow we managed. When Kate was 6 months old we could no longer take it. I was working from the kitchen table, making telephone calls to clients, and the baby always seemed to be crying in the background. By now I had a years’ worth of income records that showed I was bringing in a substantial sum of money from my consulting business. Armed with this I went to see our bank manager and I was able to get a mortgage commitment. We found a suitable 3 bedroom house with a den on the first floor that would make a perfect office and although it was not quite in the area where we wanted to be we purchased it. It was a relief to finally be out of that cramped apartment. And it seemed that with the freedom of having my own office more business came along. By the time Kate turned 2 we were doing rather well financially and I was getting calls from all over the country. Tara didn’t like it when I had to fly off for a few days from time to time, but she did like the fact that she didn’t have to go out to work. I felt that she realized that the tradeoff was worth it. After Kate was born and Tara was breast feeding her she had noticed that she seemed to be having a bit of trouble seeing things off in the distance, so she ended up with new glasses. This time her prescription had climbed to around -8.50D and her eye doctor told her that sometimes nearsighted ladies experienced an increase in their prescription due to hormonal changes during childbirth. Her new glasses looked very nice on her, and we had gotten the high index plastic lenses, so to most people it didn’t look like her glasses were any thicker. Kate was going to turn 3 in another month when I had to fly out for a meeting on the west coast. I had been away for much of the week when I arrived back home on Thursday afternoon. Tara was lying on the floor of the living room when I opened the door, and Kate was shaking her and crying. I checked for a pulse, but Tara didn’t seem to have one, and I called 911. The paramedics came but Tara was already dead. The police had to be called, and of course there was an autopsy. The results of the autopsy showed that Tara had died from an overdose of cocaine mixed with fentanyl. I was asked to take a drug test, which I did and it came out clean. If it hadn’t I think they would have figured that both Tara and I had been taking drugs and Children’s Aid would likely have taken Kate away from me. It was also fortunate in a way that I could prove where I had been for the last almost 4 days so that no suspicion could fall on me. I had no idea how it had been possible for Tara to relapse into her old drug use. And I suppose I would never find out. I should have seen the signs, but I guess I was too busy with my work to have even noticed. And I did not watch the family funds close enough to see that the grocery bill had gotten higher and higher over the past few months. But that no longer mattered; what mattered now was for me to provide a decent life for Kate. Tara had sort of reconciled with her family and although they hadn’t been a big part of our married life they were thrilled to have Kate as their granddaughter. Tara’s mom offered to take care of Kate whenever I needed her to, and she helped me with the celebration of Kate’s 3rd birthday. Kate really missed her mom though, and she was very upset that she couldn’t get mommy to wake up that day. Tara had kept all of her old pairs of glasses and they were in one of her bureau drawers. I was cleaning out her stuff one day and Kate was quite interested in Tara’s old glasses. She kept taking each pair out of their case and putting them on so she could look through the lenses. I guess I should have packed up on that, and I should have thrown the old glasses out when I donated all the clothing to a thrift store, but for some reason I didn’t get rid of them and just left them in the dresser drawer. I did look at all the pairs of glasses, and most of them were different prescriptions, however there did seem to be 2 pairs that had the same prescription, and since the pair that Tara had been wearing when she died had no case, I took the one pair from its case and put them in the garbage pail in the master bedroom and put Tara’s most recent pair in the case. At the time I thought nothing of it and planned to take whatever was in the garbage out the next time the pail was full. I don’t use the bedroom garbage often, so the pail sat for a few weeks before I bothered to empty it. I had pretty much forgotten about putting that old pair of Tara’s glasses in it, so I didn’t notice at the time that they were not still there. About a month after that I went into Kate’s room to kiss her goodnight, and she had fallen asleep – wearing that old pair of Kate’s glasses. I didn’t know what to say. I wouldn’t have minded it if Kate needed glasses, but I also didn’t want to have a confrontation with my daughter. I simply kissed her on the forehead, and left her sleeping, still wearing Tara’s old glasses that I knew had a minus prescription of somewhere between 4D and 5D. I had installed security cameras around the house, and for the next few weeks I checked the one in Kate’s room frequently. Every time I looked in on Kate I found that she was wearing her mom’s old glasses. And when she came out of her room without the glasses on I was positive that I could see her narrowing her eyes into slits to see things. It was time to do something about this. “Kate, are those a pair of your mom’s old glasses that you are wearing?” I asked as I came silently into her room and caught her wearing them. “Yes.” Kate said. “Where did you get them and why are you wearing them?” I questioned. “I took them from your garbage pail. And I see really good when I have them on.” Kate told me. “Well, if you see so “good” when you are wearing them then I suppose that means that you need glasses like mommy did. I guess it won’t do any harm if you wear them until we get you in to see an eye doctor.” I replied. Although Tara had been tall she was actually quite tiny in stature. She had a narrow face, and while her old glasses looked a little big on Kate, they did not look out of place. But the temples did not fit around her around her ears and the glasses kept sliding down her nose. I heated the earpieces in a cup of hot water, and bent them to fit tightly to Kate’s face. I had an old prescription of Tara’s that had stated her pd distance as being 58, and I checked Kate’s pd to find that she had a pd of 56, so I felt that this would not be too much of a difference. I also set up an eyechart that I had printed off the internet and I got Kate to show me what she could see both with and without Tara’s glasses on. Without the glasses she could see the big E, and she could see the T and the Z, but she told me they were all fuzzy. With the glasses on she could read the 20/30 line, but could not see everything on the 20/20 line. She was obviously quite nearsighted for a four year old. My parent’s and Kate’s parents were surprised to find that Kate needed glasses at such an early age, but since Tara had been fairly nearsighted everyone just bought the explanation that Kate had inherited Tara’s poor eyesight and soon it was an accepted fact that Kate needed glasses. She did do a lot of coloring and other near point stuff and she spent hours in her room. Of course, I didn’t mind this because I was still going a bit crazy running my environmental consulting business from the house. It was sometimes a problem not being able to go to visit clients, but most of them understood my situation and I suppose I did good work for them as I kept getting more and more work. I did try to get Kate outside on the weekends, and we often went to the park in the evening over the summer, but she actually spent far too much time indoors. One day when we were at the park she had been playing with another little girl and I could tell that she couldn’t see me talking to some other parents until her little friend pointed me out to her. I knew then that it was about time to get her a stronger pair of glasses. When we got back to the house I asked Kate if she had trouble seeing me at the park, and she told me I was all blurry. I set up the eye chart again, and I was quite shocked to find that she could only see the top 3 lines and then everything below that turned into a blur for her. I got out her mom’s old -6.50D glasses that she was wearing when we first met, and while they made it possible for Kate to see about 3 more lines down on the eye chart clearly she could not see the whole 20/40 line and everything else was a blur. I then tried Tara’s old -7.50D glasses and now Kate could almost read the 20/20 line. I then took out Tara’s pair of -8.50D glasses, and with them on Kate could see the whole 20/20 line. I knew that -8.50D was a very strong prescription for a 5 year old child, but she liked the vision that these glasses gave her. I adjusted the earpieces so that they were as tight to her face as the other pair had been and she seemed quite happy to wear them. I worried a bit about the fact that my 5 year old daughter now seemed to need glasses that had a prescription of -8.50D. This, to me, was quite a strong prescription for someone that young. And, what I had read in the past had indicated to me that a child who was that nearsighted when they were young often ended up requiring a very strong prescription as they got older. Kate really loved wearing her mother’s old glasses though, and she seemed to be able to see fairly well when she had them on. I knew I should be taking her to see a specialist, but she would likely require a referral from an optometrist and we had never been to see an eye doctor of any sort yet. I looked in the yellow pages and found an optometrist that advertised herself as being a specialist in children’s vision as well as being experienced in high myopia. This covered both bases, so I called her office. At this time it had been about 5 months since Kate had started wearing Tara’s last pair of glasses and Kate didn’t seem to be having any problems while she was wearing them. The soonest I could get a late afternoon appointment was another 3 months away and while I could likely have gotten an appointment with another doctor sooner, I didn’t think that there was any real rush. I needed some time to clear my own schedule for that afternoon anyway. Of course the receptionist asked if I had Kate’s records from her other eye doctor. I told her we had just gone to whatever doctor was on duty at the mall that day and she didn’t say any more. She took Kate’s information and then had one of the other girls take Kate to a room with a machine that she had to look through without her glasses on. The machine printed out some paper, and the girl repeated the process a couple more times. I asked the assistant if Kate needed new glasses, and she told me that it looked like Kate’s prescription had increased considerably. We were taken to an examination room, and a few minutes later the female doctor came in. She put Kate in the chair in front of a machine and she punched in something on her computer keyboard. I heard the machine whir and click, and I knew that what had happened was that the machine had placed the prescription that the other machine had found that Kate required in front of Kate’s eyes. Then the doctor asked Kate to read from the chart. When Kate stumbled on one line the doctor changed the lenses manually until she reached a point where Kate could read the whole line. Then she projected some even smaller letters onto the wall and asked Kate if she could read them. As Kate struggled to read that line the doctor changed lenses again, until finally Kate could read the whole line. Then she started on which was better, this one or that one. To her credit she allowed Kate to take her time and finally she was satisfied with how well Kate was seeing. Then she moved the machine away and she had Kate bring her chin onto the pad of another machine. She looked inside Kate’s eyes and then she gave Kate back her old glasses. Kate now needed a prescription of -11.00D for both eyes. Her mom’s old glasses had a correction for a small amount of astigmatism, but apparently Kate didn’t require any correction for astigmatism. However her spherical needed to be quite a lot stronger. I asked the doctor if we needed to take Kate to a specialist but she simply told me that she could do anything that needed to be done for Kate for the time being. I liked the straight forward manner that this doctor had, and it certainly didn’t hurt that she was a very attractive lady and also wore what I considered a fairly strong minus prescription in her own glasses. When we went to the optical store to buy new glasses for Kate I was told that it would take a couple of days before they could get the lenses in. It was suggested that a polycarbonate lens in her -11D prescription would be the best lens for Kate, but the eye doctor had suggested that we order a regular plastic lens with what is called a safety lens center thickness. This thickness is 3.0 mm instead of the normal 2.2 mm thickness and the lens will stand up to a lot more abuse. The girl at the optical store shuddered when I told her what I wanted, but other than telling me that these lenses would be quite thick she didn’t say anything more. We chose a nice purple colored plastic frame that didn’t have a really large eye size and the cost of the glasses was around $200.00.We did order the anti-reflective coating option, but other than that there were no bells or whistles. Now that I knew that Kate’s present glasses were quite a bit weaker than she needed I could notice her struggling to see a lot more over the next couple of days. I suppose if I had been told that Kate couldn’t see well before we had her eyes tested I would have had a hard time believing it, because just 8 months earlier Kate could see perfectly out of those old glasses of her mom’s. When we did pick up her new glasses 3 days after we had placed the order it was easy to see that Kate really needed them badly, because now she was able to see everything quite well and she kept commenting on how clear everything looked. To me the new glasses did look fairly thick and strong, and Kate’s eyes were minimized a lot by the lenses. However, she looked very nice wearing the new glasses and she did not seem to care that they were pretty thick. The eye doctor had recommended that I should bring Kate back for a routine checkup every 6 months. When it was time for her next appointment I hoped that her prescription would not have changed much, and I was rather pleased to find out that her present glasses would likely be satisfactory for another 6 months. Of course it was suggested that I should keep a close eye on Kate, and if it looked as if she was having problems with her distance vision, or if one of her teachers suggested that she could stand to have her eyes checked again I was to call and make an appointment for Kate. It had been about 11 months since Kate had gotten these glasses when I started to notice that she was squinting at things a lot. I asked her to read me a sign at the mall one day, and she almost had to walk right up to it before she could tell me what it said. I wasn’t sure if I should call her eye doctor to see if I could move the appointment up by 2 or 3 weeks and after a bit of indecision I decided to call Monday morning to see what the receptionist suggested. She told me she would talk to the doctor and I could expect a call back. When the phone rang a couple of hours later I was surprised that it was the doctor herself, and I was asked if I could bring Kate in as soon as possible. I told her I could manage it the following afternoon, so I planned to pick up Kate a little early from school. When we arrived at the office the receptionist had suggested that we might have a bit of a wait, as the doctor was fitting Kate in around other patients. But the actual wait time was not very long. Again the assistant took Kate and me into the other room and she had Kate look through the same machine again. I had asked the previous time what the machine was and I had been told that it was an auto refractor. Apparently the patient didn’t have to do any work. All they had to do was look in the machine and the machine could tell automatically what the prescription they required was. Then, using what the machine told them, the doctor would fine tune the prescription. I asked if Kate’s prescription had gone up much, and was rewarded with the answer that it had increased significantly. This time the doctor must have been wearing contact lenses because her glasses were missing. She had a very attractive face without glasses, but I decided I would tell her that I thought she looked nicer wearing her glasses and she rewarded me with a big smile. She examined Kate’s eyes very thoroughly again, and finally she was satisfied with the results. She did ask me when I had first noticed that Kate was again having trouble seeing things and I told her that I had called her office as soon as I had noticed anything was amiss. And I told her that Kate’s teacher had not said anything to me either. Dr. Horne explained to me that a child’s eye starts out slightly nearsighted, then it becomes a little farsighted at which point the eyeball is almost round. As they grow older they often become slightly myopic and the eye elongates. Sometimes the elongation is sudden and is quite pronounced. The child can go for a number of months without any change, and then all at once they will have a growth spurt and the eye will elongate quite a bit, which apparently was what had just happened with Kate. She had gone from a prescription of -11D all the way up to -13.50D in a very short period of time. We knew that this had occurred in the last 5 months, as 6 months ago her glasses had been almost perfect for her. As a father I was quite concerned with Kate’s rapid progression, and I expressed my concern to Dr. Horne. She explained to me that there was no way to control the progression of myopia, nor was there any way to determine how myopic Kate would end up being before her progression stopped. All that could be done for her was to watch her carefully and if there were signs that she had become more nearsighted then the best thing to do was to get her eyes tested and buy her new glasses as apparently myopia will increase rapidly if a child is struggling to see through weaker glasses than they need. Since Kate was so very nearsighted I thought it best if I purchased a new pair of glasses for her. I suggested to Kate that if she wanted thinner lenses we could possibly have her glasses made without the safety lenses, but she told me that she wanted the safety lenses again. When we picked up her new glasses a few days afterwards her lenses were substantially thicker, and when I looked at her eyes from a full frontal view of the lenses her eyes were almost hidden behind the thick lenses. Also, the outer edge of the lens had been shaved off to allow the temples to fold closed. I thought these glasses made my 6 year old daughter look as if she were almost blind, but she told me that she could see really well with them. Knowing how helpless Kate would be if anything happened to her glasses I left her old glasses with the optician and had new lenses placed in the frames. Just for the heck of it I had Kate take her glasses off and I checked to see at what distance she could see the printing in a book clearly. Her focal point seemed to be about 8 mm – or about 3” in front of her face. I knew that there were a fair number of people with prescriptions higher than -13.50 and it made me wonder how they could possibly see anything at all. But I suppose that they could see with the proper lenses and I figured I was going to find out just how well Kate could see in the future as Dr. Horne told me that she felt that Kate was one of those children that become extremely nearsighted before their progression stops. By the time Kate was 10 her prescription had climbed up to -17.50D. Her progression had averaged about -1D a year over the past 4 years and her glasses never left her face. She showered with them on, only taking them off to wash her face. And when I went in to her room to kiss her goodnight, if I didn’t find her reading a book in bed, she had pretty much always fallen asleep with her glasses on. I had tried to convince her to let me buy her the thinner lenses for her glasses, but she had always demanded the safety lenses and she wanted them to be as thick as possible. For the -17.50D pair the optical store had made them with a dished in front curve, and the frame Kate had chosen had the temple hinges set well back so that the glasses would close over what seemed to be at least 1” of edge thickness. Both the optician and I had given up on trying to get Kate to order nicer looking lenses and for some reason she loved the looks of the really thick plastic lenses. Because I had discussed different lenses with her optician I knew that there were a number of different lens choices for Kate that would look a lot nicer on her and I have to admit that sometimes it embarrassed me a little when we were out shopping and I could tell that people were staring at Kate with her thick glasses. Sometimes a mother of a child with glasses would ask if Kate was blind and all I could tell them was no, but she was extremely nearsighted. From the time Kate was 10 until the time she was 15 Kate did absolutely nothing to help her eyes. She read a lot, and even though I tried to tell her to bring her eyes back from her book to a more reasonable reading distance I would usually see her reading at a distance of about 15 cm away from the page. I read somewhere that a 10” reading distance, which was 25 cm, was like looking through a -13D prescription so her 6” reading distance was more like adding another 20D to her prescription, which by age 15 had climbed to right around -24D. Her own focal point with a -24D prescription was around 42 cm, or about 1 3/8” so she really couldn’t even see her glasses clearly until she brought them past the tip of her nose. Her time spent outside was minimal, and while she walked about 15 minutes in the morning to get to school I doubt that she spent any time at all looking around at the surroundings. I would generally pick her up in the afternoon as I timed my days so that I would have all my meetings finished by then and I would pick her up and bring her home with me. But then she would head for her room, where she would do her homework, and then she would either read or play on the computer. I had bought her a nice big screen for her computer, but she still needed to get pretty close to it to be able to see things clearly. And when she was typing I could see her glasses get closer and closer to the keyboard until it seemed that her fingers would hit her glasses if she got any closer. She also hated for her glasses to slip down her nose, and if they did she pushed them up constantly until she could get me to take her back to the optician’s to have them adjusted. Her glasses were no longer done with the 3.0mm center thickness, but even so she still insisted on having the regular plastic CR39 for her lenses, and her lenses were now double myodiscs. I was having a hard time understanding why Kate seemingly wanted to destroy her eyesight. At first I thought she wanted to wear glasses so she could be just like mommy, but this being just like mommy had gone a little too far. I wanted to take her to see a psychiatrist, but she refused and told me that she was just fine. Just fine? How many kids of 15 do you know that do everything that they can do to ruin their eyes? Her uncorrected vision was nonexistent. Even wearing her glasses she could not tell the difference between a Robin and a Blue Jay. And for her to see a Hummingbird feeding at the feeder she had to go to within about 6 feet of the feeder and then the Hummingbird would often fly away. Even with her glasses on I doubted that she could make out the individual leaves on a tree and I was sure a tree was just a green blob of color to her. Dr. Horne said she had a visual acuity of about 20/50, which was not good enough for her to ever get a license to drive, but I didn’t really know what this meant in terms of exactly what she saw. Apparently this meant that she could not see the bottom 4 lines on the eye chart at all. The bottom line, the one I always could see, was the 20/20 line. The next one was 20/25, then there was the 20/30 line and above it is the 20/40 line. But Kate could only read the top 4 lines, including the great big E at the top. When Kate was 16 she had another big jump and she now required -26D lenses to keep her visual acuity at 20/50. Dr. Horne wanted her to come in every 6 months now because her retina’s were looking a little thin and Dr. Horne wanted to keep a closer eye on them so that she could catch and prevent a retinal detachment. I thought that would scare Kate, but it didn’t seem to bother her at all. It was almost as if Kate wanted to go blind. Dr. Horne had either quit wearing contact lenses, or else she made sure she wore her glasses every day that Kate had an appointment booked. I had made sure I complimented her on her choice of frames every time we went in, because she seemed to always have a new pair of glasses on. I knew when I first saw her that she was a little more nearsighted than Tara had been just from looking at her glasses, but I really couldn’t make a guess as to what her prescription was. I made a rough guess back then that it was somewhere above -10D and likely below -15D but I really couldn’t tell. I knew she was married, but I had often told her that if she were available I would ask her out in a New York minute. I wondered if she was giving me a hint the day she told me that she and her husband had split up a year ago, and the divorce had just become final. I didn’t even hesitate and I asked her out to dinner on the following Saturday night, I had not dated much since Tara had died, but I did find that a dinner date was good, because if there was no compatibility there it was generally quite obvious before the end of the evening. “You once told me you thought I looked prettier wearing glasses. Do you want me to wear glasses, or contacts?” Lisa asked. “You just wear whatever you prefer. I do find you very attractive wearing glasses, but you are just as attractive without them.” I replied. When I arrived at her house to pick Lisa up for our dinner date I was quite pleased that she was wearing glasses. Lisa was a very attractive woman, and to me glasses were just like icing on a cake. I complimented her on her appearance and I told her that the glasses she had on looked absolutely fantastic on her. “I am pleased that you like them. I don’t usually wear glasses when I go out, but you seem to like my appearance wearing glasses so since these are a brand new pair I decided I would try wearing them for our dinner date.” Lisa told me. This was not the first time I had gone out with a woman on a real date since Tara had died, but it was the first time I had been really attracted to someone. I had been 24 when Kate was born and I was now turning 40. I thought Lisa was around my age, but in our conversation that evening I discovered that she just had her 42cnd birthday a few weeks ago. At our ages the 2 years difference was insignificant and I liked this bespectacled lady a lot. Lisa told me that she got most of the lenses for her glasses for free from different optical companies that she dealt with, and many of the frames she wore were donated by the manufacturers so she could easily afford to keep a dozen pairs in her wardrobe at all times. What surprised me though was when she told me that her prescription was now around -18D and she was still having slight increases of between -0.50D and -0.75D every couple of years. That meant that during the 11 years that she had been Kate’s eye doctor her glasses had increased in power by between -2.50D and -4.00 in that time frame. Lisa wasn’t really sure as she told me that every time she ordered new lenses for a new pair of glasses she would examine her own eyes to make sure her glasses were the best possible prescription and that she suspected that her prescription had climbed by at least -4D over the past 12 years. I had guessed at first that her prescription was somewhere between -10D and -15D but had not really noticed that her glasses had gotten so much stronger. When I mentioned that Lisa told me that once her lenses got over -14D she had started ordering lenses with a center thickness of 1mm instead of the normal 2.2mm and that made the edges look thinner. Then when she reached -16D she changed to a 1.74 hi index lens with the thinner center thickness, so it wasn’t unusual that I had not noticed her glasses getting stronger. “If you want to see me wearing strong looking glasses maybe if we go out again I will wear my new glasses with the regular old CR39 plastic lenses. They will look a bit similar to Kate’s.” Lisa said.
“You can wear whatever you want for glasses or clothing. I am sure you will still look just as lovely as you do now.” I replied. We spent a lot of time that evening discussing Kate and her vision problem. Lisa had noticed that Kate always wanted the strongest possible correction, even though she didn’t seem to be able to attain any better visual acuity than around 20/50. And Lisa had also found it surprising that Kate would not even hear of wearing contact lenses, nor was she interested in trying to get thinner lenses in her glasses. Lisa told me that to her it seemed as if Kate was trying to hide herself behind her thick lenses. I told Lisa of my attempt to get Kate to see a psychiatrist, but to no avail. Lisa and I did not run out of things to talk about and our evening could have gone on for hours. But it was getting late and we both had to get home and we reluctantly ended the evening. We decided that we enjoyed each other’s company so much that we were going to have another dinner engagement the following Saturday and I could hardly wait. When I picked Lisa up that evening she was wearing a gorgeous dress that was a darker shade of red. It fit her like a fine glove and it accentuated all her curves. On her face were the glasses she had talked about the previous week. They were a pair of black and red cat eyed glasses with a fairly large eye size and the lenses were close to an inch thick. Even so, the outer edge of the lens was a little beyond the prescription circle range, and you could see the ring of the demarcation between the prescription part and the lens. It was all I could do to stop staring at her as we drove to the restaurant I had chosen for this date. And when we were seated across from each other in the restaurant I couldn’t take my eyes off her. “I take it that you like the almost blind lady look then do you?” Lisa asked. “I like the look of a beautiful lady wearing glasses. And I hate to admit it, but I really like the looks of the thicker glasses on you. I also love it that you are so self-confident that you are willing to be seen out in public with those glasses on.” I replied. “These glasses are just my fun glasses that I got to wear around the house. They are a little heavy because of the thick lenses, but they are very easy on the eyes to wear. I would never have considered wearing them out in public for anyone else, but I read you as a guy who likes glasses.” Lisa responded. “When you are with me you can wear them anytime you feel like it.” I replied. We continued talking over dinner. Lisa had been married at 21, and she had 2 children by the time she was 26. Her youngest, a girl, was 16 and her son was 2 years older than his sister. Her husband had been a lawyer, and he was also very nearsighted, so it had not surprised Lisa when both of her children needed glasses at a young age. Her son now needed -15D glasses, and her daughter was just a little over -20D. Both her kids wore contact lenses most of the time though. Lisa wanted me to bring Kate in to see her a little sooner than the 6 month period. She told me that she had been thinking about ways to get Kate to stop trying to make her eyesight worse, and she thought that since she had noticed a very slight, almost insignificant amount of lattice degeneration around the outer edges of the lattice – where the retina attaches to the back of the eyeball – that she thought she should send Kate to see a retinal specialist with the suggestion that Kate should have this little bit of lattice degeneration lasered. I asked her what the purpose of this would be at this time, and Lisa explained that it would prevent a possible problem later on, but she thought it might throw enough of a scare into Kate that might be enough to stop Kate from doing anything more to destroy her remaining vision. We did not have any idea of why Kate was doing everything she possibly could to worsen her eyesight, but after I had told Lisa about Kate being with Tara when Tara overdosed, and trying to no avail to wake mommy up Lisa sort of thought that this episode was fixed in Kate’s brain, and that possibly by having her eyes become worse and worse Kate was trying to get this vision forced from her mind. I guessed that this might be a possibility, no matter how stupid it sounded. I did bring Kate in and Lisa referred her to a specialist. When we saw the specialist a few weeks later he had already talked to Lisa and he knew what Lisa wanted him to do so there was no discussion, he just scheduled Kate for the operation. Kate wanted to know more about this, so I told her that because she was becoming so very nearsighted there was a possibility that her retinas would detach themselves from the back of her eyes and she could end up going blind. I don’t know if this actually scared her or not. After the laser work was finished we did go back to see Lisa again, and Lisa increased her prescription to OD -27.75 x -0.50 x 90 and OS -28.00. For the first time since she had gotten glasses Kate expressed an interest in trying thinner lenses, and we did order her a pair of myodiscs in a 1.67 high index plastic. The new lenses in her plastic cats eye frame did look much better than her old ones. And I did notice that Kate didn’t seem to pull her face quite as close to the pages of whatever she was reading now, so I was hoping that she had taken all the advice Lisa gave her to heart. I knew that Kate would likely have a few more increases as she grew older, but I hoped she would not go up too much over -30, as Lisa had told me that -30D was about the highest prescription she would like to see Lisa reach. Lisa had confided in me after Kate had the laser treatment on her retina’s and she told me that actually the specialist had said that Kate’s retina’s were in very good shape for someone as nearsighted as Kate was and that he really hadn’t needed to do the laser touch up. I was spending a lot of my spare time with Lisa. She would often come over to my house to spend time with me, and Kate really didn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that Lisa and I were together frequently. And I was also spending a bit of time at Lisa’s house. At first it was only when her kids were at her ex-husbands place, but eventually Lisa and I just ended up wherever we felt like being, and that way I gradually got to know Laura and Brent. I was even there one time when her ex stopped by to pick up the kids and I met Paul. He was quite nearsighted, and wore glasses that were likely somewhere in the low -20 range. Lisa surprised me one Saturday afternoon after I dropped by her office to pick her up. She usually was open every second Saturday to catch as many school kids as she possibly could as there was not enough time after school to get them all. She had her office open from 10 am until 6 pm and once in a while she had to stay a little late if she was running behind. All she ever said when I questioned her was that she liked having children as patients, so she wanted to be available at convenient times as much as possible for them. That Saturday she asked me if I wanted to experience seeing approximately what Kate could see without glasses and I told her that would be a neat idea. She took me into her contact lens fitting room, and she opened 2 vials of contact lenses. She then proceeded to teach me how to insert them into my eye. At first it was a little difficult, but with practice it became easier and easier. The first time I had both lenses in and tried to look around it caused me to panic. Everything was in such a blur I was actually scared that I wouldn’t be able to remove the lenses. But finally I got the hang of it and I was slipping the contacts in and out like I was an old pro at it. The blur was intense and if this was actually what Kate saw without her glasses I could understand why she never wanted to have her glasses off, not even for a second. Lisa asked me to allow her to test my eyes with the contact lenses in, and I agreed to let her. She took my hand and led me into the room with all her equipment and sat me down in the chair in front of the machine that had all the lenses in it. She brought my vision to the point where I could just barely see all of the 20/50 line. At that point she told me that this was what Kate could see with her glasses on. Then she tried me on the 20/40 line and adjusted the power of the lenses upward. With the proper lenses I could easily read all of that line. Then she tried me on the 20/30 line and while she increased the power of the lenses accordingly the point was reached where I could not get the line any clearer. But the line was fairly clear with the lenses she eventually selected and she told me that I had very good accommodation to be able to see that well through such a strong combination of lenses. A week later Lisa was waiting for me at her house. Her kids were going to be gone and she called to ask me if I wanted to stay the night. I checked with Kate to see if it was all right with her if I spent the night away, and she insisted that she would be fine if I did. I headed off to Lisa’s place with a change of clothing and my overnight travel bag which had only been used a couple of times over the past 13 years since Tara had died. I had never been away from Kate overnight in all that time, although I had taken her to Disney World twice while she was growing up. I felt a little awkward bringing my bag of stuff into Lisa’s house, even though I wanted nothing more than to make love with her. Lisa sensed my feelings and she did her best to make them disappear. She was wearing another new pair of glasses. This pair was deeply dished in on the front and I figured that was so the rear of the lens could fill as much of the frame opening as possible. Even though I knew that these lenses were made to reduce the lens thickness and allow the lens to fill the whole opening I had a hard time figuring out that it was any thinner as the lenses looked to be about 2.5 cm thick along the outer edge of the frame. I loved what I saw, and I knew Lisa could tell that. We went to the living room and sat on the sofa together. I kissed Lisa, and she responded in a passionate way. “Brad, I’d like to ask you if you will do me a favor.” Lisa said. “What is that?” I asked. “You remember putting in those strong contact lenses a few weeks ago don’t you?” Lisa asked. “Sure I do. It was strange being so helpless.” I replied. “When I tested your eyes I also ordered a pair of glasses made to the prescription you needed to cancel out the contact lenses. I would love it if you would put those contact lenses in and try to wear those glasses for me tonight.” Lisa said. It was a strange request, but I didn’t refuse. Lisa took me to the bathroom and she got out the contacts along with the solution. She had a pair of glasses in a case that she did not open yet. I still remembered how to put the contacts in and I did that. I could not see Lisa as she opened the glasses case and took them out, nor could I see the glasses clearly until she had them right on the tip of my nose. She slid them tight to the bridge of my nose and things came into focus, but oh my gosh, everything was so tiny. I was looking through 2 little circles and if I tried to move my eyes outside the circles everything went blurry. But with the glasses on I gradually got accustomed to them. The tighter I had them to the bridge of my nose the less noticeable the circles were, and the clearer everything looked but I didn’t want Lisa to take them off to adjust them and I figured I would just push them back up for tonight. I tried to walk around, but I felt really dizzy and I told Lisa that. She simply said that the dizziness would pass before long. We spent much of the balance of the evening clicking glasses. I was pretty clumsy and I just wasn’t able to manage to avoid hitting my glasses on hers whenever we kissed. But Lisa didn’t seem to mind and I could tell we were both getting a bit overheated. By 10:30 we were both ready to head for the bedroom and we did just that. It had been ages since I had made love to a woman. But I remembered everything I had learned and we had a very pleasurable experience for our first time. Then we managed to repeat the performance, but with that we both felt like a shower and some sleep. Lisa provided me with a pair of shower goggles so I wouldn’t get soap or water in my eyes, as she had told me it was safe for me to leave the contacts in overnight. I took that to mean that we would be needing another shower in the morning and I was very careful about making sure just where I had placed my glasses so that I could find them as soon as I woke up. We did have to shower again in the morning, but by then it was close to noon. I realized I was very comfortable wearing the contacts and glasses combination. Lisa told me that this was called GOC, and that my contacts were +30D with my glasses being -39D. I was amazed at how well I actually could see and I asked Lisa why she had given me glasses that were so much stronger than Kate wore. She simply answered that once a person got to be over -25D there was only a focal point difference of 15mm between a -25D prescription and a -40D prescription so there was likely only about 10 or 11mm difference between Kate’s eyesight and mine right now. She went on to tell me that there was only 25 cm difference in the focal point between her now -19.50D prescription and my -39D prescription. I knew enough about metric measurements to know that this was only an inch of difference – a minimal amount. Lisa tried to convince me that we should go out for the afternoon with me wearing my GOC. I was afraid to drive with the combination, even though she told me my corrected vision was legally acceptable. But I wasn’t convinced. I still felt a rush whenever I stood up and looked around. Then she suggested that we should go for a late lunch and early supper, and that if I wore the GOC she would drive. I let her talk me into that and we went to a restaurant that she went to once in a while that was close by. I had looked at myself in a mirror wearing the glasses, and I didn’t think they looked terrible or anything. Yes, there were 2 distinct circles in the center of each lens, but you really couldn’t tell how powerful they were. After we finished it was around 4 pm, and I wanted to get home to Kate. We went back to Lisa’s and I took the GOC combination out. It took a few minutes before I felt like I was seeing normally again but eventually I felt I was good to go. Lisa insisted that I should take the contacts and glasses with me so I could wear them around home and get accustomed to them. She suggested I could tell Kate that I was doing this to help me understand the severe vision problems she had. I hated to admit it, but I had enjoyed wearing GOC a lot. I had also enjoyed my GOC lovemaking with Lisa, and I wondered if I would have another opportunity. There was something that wasn’t just right with Lisa though. We had been seeing each other for about a year now, and the first night we had sex was the other night when she got me to wear GOC. And Paul, her ex, wore a pretty darned strong pair of glasses. Was it possible that Lisa was like me? Did she find it hard to become sexually aroused unless her partner wore very strong glasses? I knew that seeing her wearing her new, slightly stronger glasses, as well as making love with her while she had them on had aroused me immensely, but did she feel the same way? My next problem was figuring out how I could introduce the topic of GOC to Kate. Finally I decided I would just tell her about it and in telling her I would simply say that Lisa had suggested doing this so that I could experience seeing things the way she did. Kate was curious, and she wanted to see me put the glasses on, which I did that evening before I started supper. I suppose that it might have helped that she was able to see me doing routine everyday chores while I wore the GOC. She wanted to look through the glasses and when she did she told me that they were too strong for her unless she pulled them down on her nose a bit. But she was interested in the lenses and I told her what Lisa had told me; that they were double myodiscs and were done in a 1.9 hi index glass with a reduced center thickness. Once I had introduced wearing GOC to Kate I started doing it a lot more frequently. I didn’t keep track of how long I wore the combination at first, but after the second week I think I was wearing my GOC pretty much from the time I woke up until the time I went to bed. I no longer felt even a touch of dizziness when I put the glasses on over the contacts. And I actually thought I was seeing a little better than I had seen for a long time. I didn’t think that things off in the distance were quite as clear, but this was likely due to the minimization. However, my close up vision was superb. I measured just how close I could get to a page in a book, and I could now focus on the print as close as 12 cm away, which was about 5 inches. I could almost still see things at a distance of 10cm, but at this point I started to be unable to fuse the images. I didn’t know if Kate reached the point where she could no longer bring the 2 images together when she brought things really close but she still read with the pages of a book around 15cm away from her face, She had, at one time, held things so close that she had to move the book away from her face so she could turn the pages. This was likely about 7.5cm, which was around 3” and I knew t it was much better for her eyes if she read at a little greater distance. The first time I drove Kate to school with my COC combination on was a little scary for me. I kept thinking that my driver’s license was not restricted to wearing glasses and I knew that if I was in an accident I would likely have a problem. I discussed this with Lisa, and she gave me a much lower pair of plus contacts along with a pair of men’s glasses that I could easily wear over the contacts. I think she had taken the glasses from the donation bin, and she had figured out the correct contacts for me to wear based on the prescription in the glasses. I then went to the DMV and I told them I needed to have a glasses restriction added to my license. They did the eye test thing and I passed with the glasses on so I ended up with a new picture and a glasses restriction. Lisa had also made me up a pair of those lenses that went dark out in the sun with a very low prescription and a reading addition so I could wear these glasses for driving even if I wasn’t doing GOC. I found that to me GOC was very addictive. The more I did it, the more I wanted to do it, and eventually I found that I was wearing the strong glasses most of the time. People who had known me without glasses before didn’t really question my new appearance much, and if anyone said anything I just told them I had a problem with my contacts and couldn’t wear them anymore. Lisa’s kids hadn’t seen that much of me, but they didn’t say anything when I showed up wearing glasses so I figured that Lisa had told them of my supposed contacts problem. The weekends that Paul had their children were the weekends we spent together for the most part. Lisa didn’t want to come to my house while her kids were home on the weekends, and I really didn’t blame her. We did often manage to stop by my place for a little lovemaking after Kate had gone to bed, but I always ended up driving Lisa home afterwards. Kate knew about our spending time in the bedroom, and one day she told me that she thought that Lisa and I should move in together. By now Kate was almost 18 and she only had another year at home before she went off to university – if she wanted to go that is. Also Lisa’s daughter Laura was going to be off to university in another year as well, and Brad had already started his university studies so we could likely get married and move in together the following year if we wanted to. Wearing strong glasses all the time really did give me a much better insight into Kate’s vision problems. Lisa actually felt that Kate should have a better visual acuity with her glasses than the 20/50 she always tested at and since I was able to achieve better than the 20/40 that was required to be allowed to drive we both wondered why Kate had such a low level of visual acuity. Lisa’s daughter Laura wore contacts much of the time, but she had a glasses prescription now of right around -23D and she had a visual acuity of 20/25. Lisa, with her now -19.50Dglasses, was able to reach 20/20 when she tested herself. Lisa and I wondered if there was any way we could get Kate to achieve a higher degree of visual acuity. Kate, however, didn’t seem to care. She felt that she had always seen this way, and she wasn’t willing to put out the effort to improve her corrected vision, which unfortunately had found her requiring stronger and stronger glasses every year. Kate did decide to go off to university, and was going to study to become a teacher, with her specialty being working with disabled children. And Lisa’s daughter Laura had decided that she was going to become an optometrist like her mom. With both kids off at university Lisa and I decided we would get married, which we did. Instead of Lisa moving in to my house, or me moving in to her house, we decided we would sell both houses and buy one we both liked that carried no baggage from our old life. It was difficult to find a house with 4 bedrooms and a den, but we did find one within a reasonable distance from Lisa’s practice and we purchased it. I still worked from the house, and since Lisa wanted me to I continued wearing my strong glasses every day. I have to admit that it wasn’t just Lisa’s urging that made me continue with GOC. Now without my GOC combination I could no longer see up close to read, as I had reached the age where I was beginning to need reading glasses. Lisa was so nearsighted she felt she would be good for a few more years before she needed to have a reading segment in her lenses, but I was doing great with reading through my strong GOC combination, and that was incentive enough for me to continue doing something that I enjoyed immensely. Lisa’s kids came home for Thanksgiving, as did Kate. Lisa wanted to examine Kate’s eyes again, as she had needed a bit of an increase before she went to university and her prescription was now right at -30D. Lisa found that Kate didn’t need any more of an increase, but something that surprised her was that with her new glasses Kate was able to achieve pretty close to a visual acuity of 20/40. This had been the first time that Kate had allowed Lisa to give her the same 1.9 hi index lenses that I was wearing with a myodisc circle in the rear and a plano front base instead of the biconcave plastic lenses she had previously worn. She examined Laura and Brad’s eyes at the same time and while Laura did not require any increase Brad had to move up a diopter to -16D. Laura and Kate got along quite well, and they acted a lot like sisters when they were together. Laura surprised me when she went the whole weekend wearing her glasses, and I wondered if she did that just to make Kate feel more comfortable. Brad and I had a number of discussions over the weekend. He was taking Chemical Engineering, the same as I had, and was doing quite well in second year. He wanted to know more about my environmental consulting business and I explained how I was advising companies how to substitute different chemicals in their products that were more environmentally friendly for the ones that they had been using. The biggest problem was to make sure the substituted products would do the job and actually were friendlier to the environment. He was very interested and he actually mentioned that possibly when he graduated he could come and work for me for a while. Things were going extremely well in my life now. My severely myopic daughter seemed to be gradually coming around to what I would consider normalcy. I had a fantastic, very nearsighted wife who must have had some form of obsession for very myopic males. We had a number of discussions about this, as one thing that I had questioned in my mind about Lisa was if she was increasing the prescriptions of her patients, but she assured me that she was very careful about not doing this. And, since I had been introduced to GOC I was enjoying wearing very strong glasses all the time. Sometimes I wished I could still wear the glasses without having to insert the contact lenses first, but Lisa told me that unfortunately there was no way out of it. I hated the fact that my daughter’s eyesight was so poor, but because of what came from her finding her mommy’s old glasses in my wastepaper basket I was actually pleased that things had turned out the way they did. Specs4ever Oct 2016