Michelle, our oldest daughter, came home from work the other day and asked me some questions about the glasses a man was wearing when he came into the convenience store and gas bar where she worked after school and during the summer holidays. Her mother and I have no problem with paying for the things she needs, like her glasses and her contact lenses as well as the braces on her teeth that she has just had removed. But we put our foot down when it came to be paying for very expensive designer jeans and the other pricey clothing that she “needed” to wear so she could be just like her friends at school. Jane and I both grew up in families that didn’t have a lot of extra money, and we both had to work for any of the nicer things we wanted. Since Michelle started working at the “One Stop” she has been spending her own money on clothing, and now for some reason she has decided that her jeans do not have to cost close to a hundred dollars for her to be able to wear them. At 14 Michelle was the girl with the railroad tracks on her teeth and the thick coke bottle glasses. She had been prescribed her first pair of glasses when she was in kindergarten, before she even started grade school. I suppose her myopia came from her mom, because Jane was what they called a “high myope” with the -7.00D prescription she needed when we were married. To me, that categorization seems to be a little erroneous, because when you compared Jane’s original -7.00D prescription with Michelle’s present day -20D prescription Jane’s old glasses appear to be wafer thin even with their regular plastic lenses. Michelle’s glasses are the ones people call bottle bottom lenses that indicate that her eyesight is very bad. When Michelle was 15, and her prescription had climbed to around -17D, at her mother’s urging we bought Michelle contact lenses for her birthday. Prior to that I had been buying her the thinnest lenses possible, but then with the added expense of contacts lenses I chose to have her glasses made in a 1.67 index – still thinner and a little more expensive than regular plastic, but the optical store had refused to make glasses for Michelle with the regular plastic lenses. Her glasses now had a little bit of the lens at the outer edge that had no prescription in the lens because the area where the prescription was didn’t reach out that far. And since Michelle had gotten contacts, her glasses remained on her dresser at home, only to come out after supper when she was safe from being seen wearing them by other than family. I don’t think she ever wore them past the front door of our house. Because her mother was myopic, I suppose that Michelle was genetically destined to also be myopic. However, I suspected that Michelle had exacerbated her own myopia. Even before she went off to Kindergarten Michelle had done a lot of drawing and coloring. After she had learned to read her own stories, she wanted to read her books by herself, which she always brought closer to her face than I thought she should. As well, when she was watching the television Michelle generally wanted to sit on the floor right in front of the screen, and I knew this distance was a little too close for proper eye health. In grade school Michelle was normally found in her bedroom reading books after school, instead of playing outside with her friends. And after she got her first glasses, she continued reading her books at a distance no greater than about 25 mm(about 10”) from her reading material. She was always complaining that she couldn’t see very well, and she needed to have her prescription increased frequently. I honestly think that one year, after my friend Peter Wahlmer, the optometrist we used, had to supply her with 2 pairs of free lenses, Peter started to give her the strongest possible prescription she could see through. After that one year she never again needed a prescription increase within the first three months. Anyway, I couldn’t, not did I want to, prove that, so now Michelle has ended up wearing contact lenses pretty much 100% of her time out in public. She has never expressed any desire to even try another type of glasses, even though I have suggested that she could get a pair with myodisc lenses, so it surprised me when she started to ask me some questions about the glasses her customer wore. I explained to her that the glasses she described to me likely had what was called myodisc lenses, and if her prescription became much stronger that type of lens would be her only choice for her glasses. I was surprised when she suggested that she might like to get that type of lenses the next time she needed a new pair of glasses, however I did tell her that the myodisc lenses were more expensive than normal lenses and she would either have to promise to wear glasses more often than she did, or else she would have to pay the difference in cost. She told me she might just wear glasses more often because they didn’t look as terribly thick as her present ones did. Pete Wahlmer was more than just Jane and Michelle’s optometrist. He and I had been friends since grade school. He was also the one person in the whole world that knew my secret. I am attracted to ladies who wear glasses. At first this attraction was towards any nice-looking female glasses wearer. But as the years passed by the ladies with the weaker prescriptions didn’t attract my attention anymore. There were just too many of them and my attention gradually started to gravitate towards those ladies that had much stronger prescriptions than my wife Jane’s now -9.00D prescription. I knew that Pete had done his best to bring Jane’s prescription up to a higher level for me, and after Michelle was born he managed to increase her prescription slightly to -8.00D Then after Scott was born he managed another diopter to get her to -9.00D. Using all the numbers Jane’s prescription, which has been stable now for 15 years, is OD -9.25 x -1.50 x 88 and OS -9.00 x -2.00 x 95. Peter has done his best to wean Jane away from wearing contact lenses and as a result she now wears her glasses more often than she wears contacts. When she started talking about getting laser surgery done on her eyes a year or two ago he steered her away from that option by telling her that she would be placing her eyesight at great risk by having the operation because her cornea’s were a little too thin for him to be able to promise success. He also told her of a few of his patients that had been operated on with results that were less than perfect, such as halo’s, ghost images and very poor night vision as well as anything else he could think of to tell her that would scare her away. But the clincher came when he told her that many of the people that had laser surgery ended up suffering from premature cataracts and then had to have cataract surgery which ended up negating the results of the Lasik because the cataract surgery would have eliminated the need for glasses anyway. Even though Jane’s present prescription is less than what I had hoped it would reach, at least she still wears glasses with a somewhat decent prescription. Another thing my friendship with Peter has done was to give me the ability to wear GOC. I travel across country one week out of every month to visit suppliers of products to the company I work for. I do quality control on parts coming off the line and am able to ensure that these parts are as close to perfect as they can be prior to shipment. Originally my GOC started as a joke for a Halloween party Jane and I went to not long after we were married. Pete had a pair of very thick minus glasses in his donation box and he showed them to me one night after I had dropped by his store to pick Jane up after an eye exam. I put them on, and both Pete and Jane laughed at my total nerd appearance. “I can’t see a darned thing, but it sure would be neat if I could wear these glasses all taped up, with an ink stained white shirt that was a little big for me, a pocket protector and a slicked back bad haircut.” I remember saying. “I could probably make it possible for you to wear those glasses if you didn’t mind wearing contact lenses Dave.” Pete replied. And out of that conversation came my introduction to GOC. Pete gave me the glasses and sold me the contact lenses. I was a hit at the Halloween party, and no one could quite figure out how it was possible that I could see out of such thick and obviously strong looking glasses. I know I was a bad boy when I told people that they were my old real glasses and that I wore contact lenses all the time. After the party was over, I cleaned up the glasses, removed the residue from the tape, and then wore the glasses over contacts around town once in a while. When Pete saw that I was wearing GOC infrequently he suggested that I might like to get myself a pair of glasses that were properly matched to the contacts I already had. I did that and I ended up with a pair of glasses that had a prescription of -18.50D in both eyes and were made from a new type of hi index glass. These glasses looked strong, but not really thick and unless you happened to look at my face and realize that the cut in indicated a strong prescription, or if you got a half sideways front view and saw that the power rings in the glasses went on and on, you really couldn’t tell that these glasses were any stronger than my wife’s were. My weekly quality control trips to the factories I visited often became GOC trips as well. All the people at the plants I visited became accustomed to frequently seeing me wearing glasses and I loved it. I still wore glasses once in a while around town when I was home, but most of the time I went without. And occasionally at home, after the kids were in bed, I would make love to Jane while we both wore glasses. But once Michelle was prescribed her glasses, I pretty much quit doing GOC except for during my weekly trips. The strange thing about it though was that I now had the urge to have my eyes operated on to allow me to become very nearsighted so that I could wear glasses for real. But that was one thing that Peter could not arrange for me so I just wore my GOC whenever I could. The trouble with myodiscs was that you could never really predict how an optical lab was going to make them. I discussed this with Pete, and he told me some horror stories about how different labs created myodisc lenses. Most of the time they took a positive lens blank, flipped it around and ground the required prescription into the plus side, which was commonly called a lenticular myodisc. Sometimes the minus was ground into the rear of a minus lens blank and then the area where the circle would have been clearly defined was blended from the (in my daughter’s case -20D ) required prescription to the -3D or so prescription in the original lens blank. This was called a blended myodisc. Some of the end results had been less than attractive (actually Pete had said ugly as sin) when the finished lenses were placed in the frame the customer had chosen. From what Michelle had described to me the lenses she had noticed and liked had been made by taking one of her thick plano fronted lenses and flattening the thick edges in the rear off so that there was a distinct circle in a carrier that was flat on both sides. This had been called a fried egg myodisc by a number of people many years ago, but finally people had started to realize that that this actually was the nicest looking method. Pete told me it was called a myodisc on a plano plano base. I had seen this type of lens once or twice, but it was not something that was ordinarily seen. People who wore myodisc lenses were not seen out in public very often even by a person like me, a dedicated optical observer. Michelle was due a checkup and after Pete discovered that she needed to have the power of her contacts increased slightly we decided that she could get a new pair of glasses. Her new -21.00D lenses were going to be made as myodiscs, with a 30mm bowl and the front and rear were going to be plano base – except for the bowl of course. When her new glasses arrived both Jane and I were a little surprised that Michelle wore them as often as she did. She still wore her contacts to school about 3 days a week, but she wore her new myodiscs at least 2 days as well as most weekends. On the days she wore her glasses she also wore them to work, and before long no one seemed to notice her glasses. What was quite interesting to me was that her current boyfriend seemed to like her wearing glasses as she often wore them when they went out on a Friday or Saturday night. I am going to miss seeing my myodisc wearing daughter around the house when she goes off to university next year. I am pleased though that she has come to terms with her myopic eyesight, and willingly wears her glasses often enough to rest her eyes from her contacts. I suspect that one day when she marries there will be a nearsighted grandchild or two following in both my wife’s and my daughter’s footsteps. I have gotten quite an education in myopia and the progression of it, and I am not unhappy that I now have a daughter that wears myodiscs. Specs4ever May 2019
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