When a baby is born, at birth they can detect light and motion, and can also make out faces and large objects. After the first month a baby can make eye contact and focus on objects about 11 or 12 mm away. Over the next few months, they gradually become able to focus on most items and during the first year they generally become slightly farsighted, which later turns to emmetropia as they get older. Once in a while, in a very rare case, a baby remains extremely nearsighted. This is really an exception to the rule and is more likely to happen in babies who are born prematurely and require oxygen at birth, which is called retinopathy of prematurity or ROP. But sometimes a baby’s eyeballs just never develop past the nearsighted part and then they go through life dependent on very thick glasses or contact lenses to be able to see much of anything.
In these rare cases, whether the child has decent vision depends on if the parents are on the ball or not. If the very nearsighted child does not get corrective lenses before he or she is at least a year old, the future development of their vision is in grave danger. They can develop strabismus, possibly nystagmus, a possible requirement for prisms in their glasses as well as focusing problems that leave them with low vision for life. And if left uncorrected until they are over the age of 2, their binocular vision does not develop properly. Most ophthalmologists do not ever see a child that is just plain extremely shortsighted from birth. Their pediatric clients generally have ROP, or other problems such as Ocular Sticklers or Marfan’s Syndrome or simply muscle imbalance requiring prism correction or an operation. I was one of the few babies that was just very nearsighted from birth. As I grew larger my eyeball remained elongated and my vision for the first few months of my life was nothing but a blur. I was fortunate however, because my mom felt that there was something wrong with my eyesight when I was around 6 months. By 9 months, after lots and lots of testing, I got my first pair of glasses. Mom told me that it didn’t take me long before I would start rocking the crib in the morning to let her know I wanted my glasses placed on my face and strapped to my head.
My childhood was rather unremarkable. I do remember being in stores with mom when I was around 4 or 5, and other shoppers would remark to mom that it was a shame that I needed such thick glasses. I knew that without my glasses I couldn’t see much more than blurred shapes and fuzzy colors, so the glasses I wore didn’t bother me at all. I do remember that when I first started school mom cautioned me to never let anyone talk me into letting them look through my glasses, and it wasn’t until I was in Junior high before I went against her advice and let a friend put my glasses on. I was embarrassed by the remarks that he made, and I made sure I never did that again. But for the most part my school years were unremarkable. I suppose I did have to learn to live with the odd unkind remark about my thick glasses and being 4 eyed and all that, but I don’t remember being terribly hurt by any of the comments. It might have helped that I had quite good eyesight with glasses and I was not forced to sit at the front of the room by any of my teachers, so I was never centered out for my poor uncorrected vision.
Throughout my school years I really didn’t have a problem. I have since learned that by getting glasses when I was very young my eyes developed properly, and they worked together as they should, as long as I wore my strong glasses. I played baseball, and even with my poor uncorrected eyesight as long as my glasses were on my face, I was a pretty good player. I could hit, I could catch, and I often pitched. I was not allowed to play Lacrosse or football, because they were contact sports and if I were hit in the head, I might possibly end up having a retinal detachment. But I was on the swim team and my dad had taken a pair of the lenses from an old pair of glasses to shape to fit, and glued them inside a pair of swim goggles. This worked and I really enjoyed my time swimming.
When I graduated, I went off to college. After college I was given a deferment from military service because of my poor eyesight so I missed Vietnam, which was the one good thing about being extremely nearsighted. I ended up going to law school, and then into corporate law. My glasses had required stronger lenses a few times over the years, but for the most part my ophthalmologist was surprised and pleased at how good my visual acuity actually was. He often suggested that I should try contact lenses, but I had bad memories from the first hard lenses I had tried back in the mid 60’s and I was satisfied with my vision wearing glasses, so I just didn’t want to bother with them.
In my late 20’s I had wondered about getting married, as I did not want to pass my severe myopia on to any of my children. My parents had not been myopic, and of my 3 sisters only one of them wore glasses for the correction of myopia. I felt that her myopia had been self-induced. It was not that she tried to become myopic, but she was a reader from an early age and she always had a book in front of her nose. It wasn’t a huge surprise to the family when she had her eyes tested at age 11 and was prescribed glasses. She ended up with a rather substantial -13.50D prescription, but she recently had cataract surgery and no longer needs her distance glasses.
While I was deciding if I should attempt to date, with the thoughts of getting married, one of the law clerks at the firm was spending a lot of time with, and around me. Leslie was quite attractive, and I sort of wondered what drew her to me, as I am a fairly tall, kind of a bumbling type of guy that needs what I consider rather unattractive looking thick lensed glasses to see anything at all. I had been told that I am a good-looking man without my glasses, but of course that was never an option. I had tried all of the tricks over the years to try to get a decent looking pair of eyeglasses, but I felt that I had mostly wasted my money. After all, there is really no way that a pair of glasses with a -40D prescription can look anything less than what they are – a pair of very strong glasses. But Leslie didn’t seem to be put off by my very strong glasses and we frequently began meeting each other in the lunchroom. It took a while for the message to sink into my thick head that she would not be averse to going out with me. I don’t know if the years of not wanting to be rejected for my poor eyesight was part of the reason why I had avoided any attempt at a relationship, but when I finally got the courage to ask Leslie to have dinner with me one Friday night after work, I was pretty pumped about the fact that she had agreed. We dated frequently after that first date. I had no trouble seeing the movie screen from a distance that was quite an acceptable distance for most people and I think I surprised Leslie the first time we went to a movie together by how far back I was willing to sit. She kept asking me if we were close enough for me, and I assured her that I could see perfectly from where we sat.
By 1976 Leslie and I had been dating for about 3 years when I asked her to marry me. Two of my three sisters had married and both of them had children that had made it to the age of 3, with neither of them needing glasses. This made me feel more comfortable with the thought of having children as I was no longer worried that my rather unusual high myopia from birth condition would genetically be passed on to any of my offspring. I discussed this with Leslie, who told me that even if our kids ended up being nearsighted, it wouldn’t be the end of the world to her. With that I asked her to marry me, and we were married later that year. Over the next few years, we were leading a pretty normal life. We had 2 children, a boy first and then a girl. We had the house in the suburbs that was the American dream and even though I am licensed to drive even with my strong glasses I made sure we were close to public transit to allow me to get to work by bus. Leslie took a few years off from her job to raise the children and they both grew up not needing glasses until my daughter was approaching the middle of her first year at university. She has worn glasses since then for the correction of her myopia, which is much much lower than mine. After the birth of our 2 grandchildren the lenses of her glasses seem pretty thin, but her glasses now have flat front’s and I suspect they are maybe around -9D or maybe -10D. I don’t ask her any questions as I hate to have people ask me anything about my glasses or my eyesight.
It took me a few years of marriage to figure out why Leslie was attracted to me. I finally clued into the possibility that it might not have been my good looks, or my calm, unflappable personality. It was the fact that I was so very nearsighted that I was absolutely helpless without my glasses. She never came right out and told me that, but over the years I had many hints that allowed me to eventually clue in. She was always fine with me leaving my glasses on when we made love on a Sunday morning, and she would often take them from me afterwards and clean them for me. She never put me into any sort of situation where I felt that she enjoyed my helplessness, so I didn’t even think that she liked seeing me look at her through unfocused eyes. I never would have suspected it, but when I was at work, at first she would sometimes wear a pair of my old glasses around the house. She couldn’t possibly have seen a thing, but apparently that lead her to do some investigating on the internet and she found out that with the correct plus contact lenses a person could wear practically any pair of strong minus glasses. The only problem was if the original glasses had a large amount of astigmatism this made them impossible for the wearer to have good vision wearing them. I had a small amount of astigmatism – maybe around -1.00D in one eye, so with the right contact lenses Leslie was able to wear my glasses. After I found this out, apparently after the kids were in school full time, she wore my old glasses over a pair of plus contacts around the house for the entire day.
Sometimes we wish we were able to know what the future will bring. I know I would have retired at least 2 years earlier so I could spend more time with Leslie before she died. We did take a few cruises and some extended holidays, but I kept going into the office right up to the day we went to the hospital together and the doctor told us that Leslie had stage 4 cancer. I did retire immediately, but it was a downhill battle from that day, and today Leslie has been gone for a month. Now I am alone in this old house that we raised our family in, wondering what I will do and expecting to momentarily see Leslie walk around the corner into the room. Right now, I am sitting here reading some of her old diaries, and that is how I found out that her attraction to me was mostly because of my glasses. And that is how I found she had gotten plus contact lenses to wear under my old glasses. I wish I had known. I think I would have bought her new, more feminine looking glasses and then we could have gone out to a movie or even just a walk together, or maybe even gone on a cruise with her wearing a proper GOC combination. I wish I had my Leslie back.
Specs4ever: April 2020