When I was 15, and was in my first year of Senior High, I wasn’t interested in sports. I had been a pretty good baseball player before my eyes went bad, but even though I now wore contact lenses I no longer had the urge to compete with the other guys on the playing field. I then decided I would sign up for the drama club, since an extra curricular activity was looked upon very favorably by the administration. Also, it didn’t hurt that our drama teacher was a very hot looking petite dark haired teacher with a body like a model.
It was actually fun being in the drama club. And, Mrs. England, our teacher seemed to think I had a natural flair for acting. I didn’t think I did, but I certainly wasn’t going to argue with her, because I got one of the better parts in the school play. And I soon found out that there was an extra bonus one afternoon when I came into the auditorium. Mrs. England was standing talking with another absolutely gorgeous blond lady that I recognized from a movie that I had recently seen. She introduced the lady as Melissa Sparkman the model and the actress, who just happened to be a very good friend of hers.
For the next few weeks Melissa would show up in the afternoon to help coach us with our acting, and I have to admit that she was able to give me some excellent tips. I really enjoyed being around Melissa, and like any other almost 16 year old boy I fell in love with her.
Shortly after my 16th birthday I was walking out of the school after play practice when Melissa pulled up beside me in the little Miata convertible she drove.
“Can I give you a ride Craig?” Melissa asked.
Any hot blooded 16 year old would have jumped into the passenger seat of her car. I didn’t even hesitate nor did I give her invitation much thought as I let Melissa drive me home. The conversation was slightly weird though, because I got the impression that Melissa had offered to have me come over to her place and she would give me some private acting lessons.
A couple of days later at school Melissa asked me if I had given any thought to her offer to give me some pointers. I told her that I would love it, so we agreed that I would come by her house on Saturday morning.
Looking back on it all after the fact I suppose that all along I had the feeling that Melissa was interested in me more than she was in teaching me acting. I had fantasized about having sexual relations with Melissa, but other than doing the hand jive I had never had any sort of sexual relationship. After I showed up at her door that first Saturday morning I soon learned that I was about to become initiated into a 16 year olds fantasy. Things started off fairly routinely, with Melissa instructing me how to kiss for an audience. Of course we had to practice this a lot, and I found that I liked her tongue sliding into my mouth. Before I knew what had happened we were in her bedroom where I was rapidly initiated into how a man and a woman copulate.
Melissa didn’t have to tell me not to brag about me being with her. Even if I had tried, none of my friends would have believed me. But some of them got a little suspicious when I went to Melissa’s house every Saturday for private acting lessons, although I don’t think they really thought anything was going on.
Melissa was often away on location shooting scenes for her movies for a couple of weeks every few months, so this meant she wasn’t able to drop by the school to help her friend with the drama club because of the movie shoots. Also, she was still modeling, and although most of her work was done in the city, every once in a while she had to fly off to some exotic location for a few days. Even though we were not able to be together every weekend, by the time I was 18 and was graduating from High School we had spent a considerable amount of time between the sheets. Melissa had contacted her agent on my behalf, and I had been accepted into an accredited acting course that was being given by another friend of hers. I was also modeling for the same photographer that gave Melissa most of her work. She was helping me immensely with my future career and although I occasionally wondered how it was that I had been lucky enough to be taken under her wing I certainly wasn’t going to do anything to rock the boat.
Back when I was 15 if anyone had told me that I would be sleeping with a lady who was 13 years my senior I would have told them they were crazy. I would never hook up with someone that old. But at the age of 18, Melissa’s advanced age of 31 didn’t seem to be as much of an issue. She was very active, and very experienced in bed, and she had trained me to satisfy her in ways I had never dreamed of. Melissa had told me that she was extremely nearsighted, and while I sometimes took out my own contacts when we were in bed together she never removed hers. I didn’t take mine out often because by age 18 my prescription had climbed significantly, and my contacts, which were -12D, were the strongest ones I could get in the daily disposables that I had worn since I was 14. I had never worn my glasses around Melissa because I was ashamed of how thick the lenses looked. My parents were not willing to spend the extra money to buy me the more expensive high index lenses for glasses I only wore infrequently around the house.
Now I was earning some serious coin with my modeling, so I certainly could have spent some money updating my -14.25D glasses with new, thinner lenses. But lately I had been noticing that my distance vision had been deteriorating again and when I was driving Melissa’s convertible around I had been having a hard time reading the street signs. This was so unfair, but this is exactly what had gone on since I was 11 years old and got my first glasses. From not needing glasses at age 10, until now my eyes had developed more than -14.25D of myopia. It seemed that every 9 months or so I needed a sizable increase in my prescription. Now my eyes were so bad I could barely see clearly any more than about 3” in front of my nose. Even my doctor had no idea why they kept getting worse. I had learned from past experiences that it was useless to try to delay getting a new prescription, because the couple of times I tried that my prescription really jumped and my doctor explained that this was the result of trying to struggle too much to see. I was determined to make an appointment with my eye doctor for an exam as soon as he could get me in.
The increase was just about what I expected. My new contacts were going to have to be -13.00D. My doctor didn’t have any lenses of this power in stock, so he was going to have to order them for me. I trusted him to know what would work best for me because I was going to need a different type of lenses. Now I was going to need what the doctor told me would be quarterly replacement lenses which came in little bottles called vials. I chose a frame that the optician liked on my face, and she ordered my new glasses with 1.74 hi index plastic lenses. The glasses and contacts I had just ordered were going to set me back almost a grand.
When Melissa got back from her photo shoot I told her that I had ordered new contacts and glasses. She asked me what my prescription was for my glasses, and when I told her that my new glasses were going to be -15.50D she didn’t really say much. She had always said that her eyes were really bad, but when she didn’t say anything I thought that possibly my eyes were actually worse than hers now.
Soon after that Melissa asked me if I wanted to move in with her. I had still been living with my parents, and, like all parents, they had been treating me like I was a little boy. I was more than prepared to move in with Melissa.
I loved living with Melissa. We never cooked anything and we went out to eat at a different restaurant every night. Then when we came home and went to bed she seemed to have an insatiable desire for sex. We always left our contacts in until we had finished and showered, then took them out and groped our way to bed. Melissa didn’t even have a pair of glasses, so she always put her lenses in the minute she got up, but now that I had a pair of glasses I didn’t mind wearing I would sometimes sit around in the morning with my glasses on. I really didn’t think there was anything strange about Melissa not having any glasses, although I did comment once or twice that it might be a good idea if she had glasses in case she couldn’t wear contacts sometimes, but this fell on deaf ears.
One morning Melissa woke up and, as usual, immediately stumbled into the bathroom to put her contacts in. She was in there a lot longer than she normally was, so I went in to check on her. She was removing her right lens and re wetting it with solution and as I approached she had just popped it in again. I heard her mumble “shit” and I saw her remove her lens again.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
‘Craig, would you please be a dear and look at my right eye. I can’t seem to get my lens to feel comfortable.” Melissa said.
“Oh baby, that eye doesn’t look very good. It is all red. You better not put your lenses in today.” I replied.
“I have to put them in. I can’t see a thing without them.” Melissa stated.
“You better not. That eye is so red and inflamed you might really damage it. I had better get you in to see your eye doctor.” I answered.
“What can I do in the meantime? I am helpless without my contacts.” Melissa said.
“You said your eyes were pretty bad. Maybe you can use my glasses if they aren’t too strong.” I replied.
“Too strong? Your glasses are way too weak. I could probably wear your contact lenses plus your glasses and still not be able to see very well.” Melissa told me.
I doubled the prescription of my glasses quickly in my head and came up with -31D.
“You mean your eyes are worse than -31D?” I asked.
“They are a lot worse than that. At my last eye exam my doctor told me that my contacts needed to be -30D for both eyes, and glasses have to be much stronger than contacts. Actually, the last couple of pairs of glasses I have tried before my eyes got this bad were almost useless, as it is extremely difficult to get a decent refraction when the patient has such a high prescription.” Melissa told me.
“I don’t know what to suggest then. You definitely can’t put your contact lens in that right eye.” I replied.
Finally I convinced Melissa that she should take the contact lens out of her left eye as well, and that I would take her in to see her ophthalmologist. I called and was fortunate enough to get an appointment right after lunch.
Fortunately for Melissa her red eye was not the more serious type of conjunctivitis, which is viral conjunctivitis. Her pink eye was cause by a bacterial infection and would clear up in 7 to 10 days with treatment of an antibacterial eye drop. But wearing her contact lenses until the infection cleared up was not a possibility. For the next 7 to 10 days Melissa was going to be effectively blind. It looked as though I was going to have to act as her seeing eye dog.
Over the years Melissa’s ophthalmologist had tried a number of times to get a pair of glasses for her that she could wear in an emergency. Her prescription had seemingly stabilized after she turned 29, as she had not required an increase since then. Now at age 32 her -30D contact lens prescription would require that her glasses would have to be somewhere around -50D and would need to sit on her nose at exactly the point where her vertex distance was measured. This time when he suggested that it might be a good time to try to get a pair of glasses for her that she could wear, Melissa begrudgingly agreed.
After a lot of measuring and testing the doctor got me to help Melissa try on a number of frames. Her lenses were going to have to be a very high index double myodisc and the doctor needed to have the frame so that he could determine the precise location for the lenses in front of Melissa’s eyes. His determination was that her glasses would need to be -46.50D for each lens, and they needed to sit exactly 12.0 mm from her eye. Melissa ordered the glasses and left a sizeable deposit. These glasses were going to be very expensive, not only because of the price of the high prescription, but also because Melissa wanted them to be rushed to her as soon as possible.
As soon as possible is a subjective term, and in this case there was no possibility that her glasses would show up before her eye infection cleared up. The only solution for Melissa that the doctor could suggest was that she should wear her one contact lens, and she could wear an eyepatch over the other eye. This seemed to work, although Melissa really hated the fact that she had no binocular vision at all.
It tool all of the 10 days that the doctor had suggested it would for the pink eye to clear up. But finally her eye doctor allowed Melissa to go back to wearing her contact lenses and the eye patch was put away in case it was ever needed again. Her glasses took another 2 weeks after this before the doctors office called and said they had arrived. We went over that afternoon because the doctor wanted to check her vision while she was wearing her glasses. Melissa removed her contacts and the optician helped with fitting her glasses. Melissa didn’t like her vision through the lenses of the glasses and she complained that everything looked really strange.
When the doctor checked her vision with her glasses on he was quite pleased with her visual acuity with the glasses on. She couldn’t come anywhere close to what she could see while wearing her contact lenses, but apparently with such a strong prescription it was considered to be quite good that she could see most of the letters on the 20/50 line. And the doctor told her that after she got used to wearing glasses it was possible that she could get closer to 20/40 or better.
I drove her home because there was no way she could legally drive wearing her glasses. Sure, her license was still valid, but if she had been in an accident and it was discovered that her vision was only corrected to 20/50 she would have been in real trouble.
It took me a while before I got used to seeing Melissa wearing glasses. They actually looked quite nice on her considering how strong they were. It was obvious when you looked at her from a distance because the edge of her face was inside the outer edge of the myodisc circle and you could sort of see things behind her in that area. But other than that, and the fact that her eyes were very tiny behind the lenses of the glasses I quite liked her appearance wearing them.
The eye doctor had suggested that Melissa should start wearing her glasses more frequently to give her eyes a rest from the contact lenses. She had discussed the possibility of having some form of lens implants, but he had advised her against doing that. Apparently lens implants have been found to bring on the formation of cataracts in your real lenses much faster than would normally occur, so the chances were that she would require cataract surgery much sooner. This would be a complete waste of the almost $9.000.00 that the lens implants would cost. And Melissa’s myopia was so severe that implantable contact lenses wouldn’t come anywhere close to correcting her vision so she would still be forced to wear glasses or contacts - albeit a much lower prescription. Her other option would have been to have her inner lenses removed and replaced with a type of bifocal lens that also had as much minus correction in it as possible, but the doctor wasn’t even sure that this was available. Then she would also have to have the implantable contacts put in to take up the rest of her required correction.
The money that would be required to do all of that wasn’t a problem. But the doctor still didn’t really want to touch Melissa’s eyes. Apparently her retina’s were very fragile, and while they were still firmly attached, the doctor was convinced that any sort of trauma to her eye might cause a detachment, and then she would be in real trouble.
After a lot of careful thought Melissa and I decided that for the time being it would be better if we left things well enough alone. It was better for her to have the vision she had instead of possibly going blind.
Now, when we were hanging around the house in the morning Melissa would wear her glasses. As soon as we went anywhere we would both put in our contacts to be seen in public. This seemed to be the best way to do it, and we were even able to go back to work.
Fortunately there have been no further incidents of pink eye. We are both very careful about changing our solutions and rinsing out the case for the lenses, and the only time we ever go more than about 8 hours of wearing contacts is when we are on the set shooing movies or commercials.
Neither Melissa nor I made it as a big name star. But we did have a very enjoyable life. I asked Melissa to marry me a couple of times, but her attitude was that we shouldn’t ruin a good thing. And maybe she was right. I had it made with my own personal actress.
Specs4ever Nov 2013
https://vision-and-spex.com/my-own-personal-actress-t541.html