My attraction towards people who wear glasses probably began when I was around 3 years old. My cousin Vanessa was the daughter of my father’s sister and she had been born a little prematurely, which supposedly led to her being very nearsighted and having to wear glasses from an early age. My first memories reach back to around the time I was 3 and Vanessa was 6 and I know I was very curious as to why Vanessa always had to have her glasses on. Our parents frequently spent a lot of time together and it was only natural that Vanessa and I would be left to play together. I enjoyed playing with Vanessa, but I seem to remember feeling that Vanessa was not always pleased to have to ensure that I was kept occupied. After leaving Uncle Jim and Aunt Pat’s place there was always a bit of a discussion between my mom and dad about poor Vanessa and about the fact that she was essentially blind without the strong glasses that she had to wear. I had never noticed that Vanessa had any problem with seeing things when she had her glasses on, and I think that my mind led me to believe that as long as Vanessa could see as well as she seemed to be able to while wearing her glasses there really was no problem and there was no reason to call her poor Vanessa. To me that also meant that there was not really a problem with anyone having to wear glasses as thick as Vanessa’s were. By the time Vanessa was 9, I was 6, and the difference in age did not matter quite as much. I could do almost everything that Vanessa could, and it was a lot more fun playing together. Vanessa had been very good with me over the previous 3 years, and under her tutelage she had taught me to draw and color along with helping me learn my numbers as well as the letters of the alphabet. I could probably read as well as she could by the time I was 6. During the previous 3 years I had spent a lot of time staring at Vanessa’s glasses, and I had gradually begun to think that I would like to wear glasses just like hers. When I had expressed this wish to Vanessa, she had gotten out some of her old glasses and she had let me try them on. She told me that all her old pairs were around the same prescription as her eyes really hadn’t changed much since she got her first pair, but the pair she wore at age 9 looked to be a lot thicker than the ones she had worn when she was around 5 or 6. I really couldn’t tell, because when I put a pair of her glasses on, I wasn’t able to see much more than a blur. If I managed to keep them on for a little longer period of time, I could gradually force my eyes to overcome most of the blur, but it seemed that once I was able to sort of make my eyes focus for a short time my eyes would soon get tired and then they would go out of focus. When I was 7, I asked Vanessa if I could take one of her old pairs of glasses home with me. She let me do this, but she told me that if my parents ever caught me with them, I would have to tell them that I had taken them from her room without her knowing. I agreed and from that day on I wore her old glasses at home whenever I could. I was always afraid of getting caught by my mom when she came home from work, because Vanessa’s glasses were so heavy that if I wasn’t really careful to put a small piece of cloth on my nose under the nose pads the marks the glasses made were quite visible on my nose. I knew that what I needed was a pair of glasses of my own to wear so that I would no longer have to worry about having glasses marks on my nose. After a few months of being able to wear Vanessa’s old glasses whenever I possibly could I was getting pretty good at being able to force my eyes back into my head so that I could focus through Vanessa’s strong lenses. If I remember correctly, by the time I reached my 8th birthday I was able to wear Vanessa’s glasses for a few hours a day and could really focus quite well through the strong lenses. And now, when I took her glasses off after wearing them for more than a couple of hours it took a long time before I could see distance objects clearly again. By now I really wanted to wear glasses so I didn’t stop wearing Vanessa’s glasses and wore them every chance I could get. I would take them with me whenever I went anywhere and sometimes when I was supposed to be going to a friend’s house I would often just go to a park and walk around by myself wearing Vanessa’s glasses without actually going to any of my friends. Sometimes on weekends I could have a chance to wear glasses for as long as 8 hours at a time, but generally around 4 hours was the longest period of time I could count on being by myself. The days I wore them for 4 hours would now leave me squinting to see things for at least a couple of hours after I took them off, and I was pretty sure that if I had my eyes tested right after I took Vanessa’s glasses off the doctor would find I needed my own glasses. I had my own health insurance card, so I didn’t have to ask my parents for money to pay for an eye exam. But I didn’t know how I would get away with making an appointment without telling my parent’s first. If I told them, I knew my mom would insist that she went with me to the eye doctor’s. However, the solution came about in an unusual way. My teacher must have noticed me squinting at the board on more than one occasion and one day she gave me a note to take home to my mom suggesting that I should have a vision exam. School was out at 3pm, the eye doctor on my way home was open until 6pm. If I went in around 5 pm, after wearing Vanessa’s glasses for 2 hours it was possible that I could have my eyes tested before they returned to what I now knew as normal blurry. That night after I left school I put on Vanessa’s glasses and went to a nearby library that I did not often go to. Reading was very difficult for me when I was wearing Vanessa’s glasses, but I could manage to make my eyes sort of focus after a few minutes. I chose a book to read, and I killed an hour and a bit before I walked to the eye doctor’s office. I took off Vanessa’s glasses and put the case in my backpack right before I got there, and when I went in to book an appointment, things were as blurry as I expected them to be. I had no expectations of getting an appointment that day, but the receptionist had me fill out some forms and told me to take a seat as the doctor had a cancellation and could see me shortly. A few minutes later a girl in a white coat asked me to come with her, and I followed her to a room where she sat me down in front of a machine that I had to look into with each eye separately and then with both eyes together. She didn’t really ask me any questions, but the objects I was looking at came into perfect focus. Then she took me to what she called an examination room and sat me down in a chair with a big machine next to it. It seemed like a long time, but I suppose it was only a few minutes before an older, well-dressed man came into the room. He asked me a few questions about my vision, and I told him my teacher had just given me a note to take home to my parents suggesting that I have my eyes checked. With that he asked me if I had noticed that I was having problems seeing things off in the distance and I told him that things seemed a lot blurrier now that I was almost 9. He swung the machine in front of my eyes and adjusted the headpiece and the place where I rested my chin. Then the machine made a funny clicking noise and all of a sudden, the chart on the wall looked very clear. He asked me how that looked, and I told him things were still a little fuzzy, so he clicked a few more times. I told him it was better, but still not perfect, so I got a few more clicks from the machine. Then when he asked, I told him that was a lot better, but the edges of the letters were still a bit fuzzy. I knew from all my experience with Vanessa’s glasses that I could focus through even stronger lenses, but that I should likely stop after the next few clicks. This time I told him it was perfectly clear. The doctor asked me if this was really the first time, I had my eyes tested and I told him it was. He wrote out some numbers on a piece of paper and handed it to me, but first he told me that my prescription was one of the strongest he had ever written for a first-time wearer. I asked him if that meant that I should wear my glasses all the time, and his response was that once I got my glasses, I would want to always wear them. I thanked him and I went on home to tell my parents. But first I looked at the numbers. The first number for each eye was -4.50 and then there were some second numbers. I really didn’t know what they meant. That day I did not wear Vanessa’s glasses while I walked home. I gave my mom the note when she got home a few minutes after I did, and I told her I had stopped by the eye doctor to make an appointment, but they had a cancellation, and he was able to see me right away. Then I handed her the prescription slip and told her the doctor told me I would need to wear glasses all the time. When dad came home mom told him, and they decided he would clean up after supper while mom took me to the mall so I could get my new glasses. Needless to say, I was quite excited that my plan was falling nicely into place. At the one-hour optical store the optician that was helping us tried her best to talk my mom into buying me the thinner lenses. She offered a sizeable discount that brought the cost of the thinner lenses to within $50.00 of the price of the regular lenses, but I convinced mom that the cheaper lenses would be just fine. I also mentioned that the eye doctor suggested that I might need an increase in my prescription when I went back in 6 months as the doctor had requested. Finally, my new glasses were ready and when the optician had finished her adjustments and I was able to maintain my focus for more than a minute or so I could easily tell that my own glasses were a little stronger than I had required. But I gushed on and on about how perfect they were and how happy I was that I could see well again. And it was true. By the time mom and I got home I could see very well. I had chosen a frame that was very similar in appearance to Vanessa’s glasses. The lens opening size was a bit bigger, but unless the 2 pairs were placed on a table together this was not really obvious. I hoped that after people got used to seeing me wearing glasses, I could get away with wearing Vanessa’s glasses all the time, but I knew that was likely just a dream. The lenses in my own glasses looked reasonably thick, and I liked that a lot so I felt I would just have to be satisfied with wearing them. After all this I had finally achieved my dream. Vanessa was now 12, and she had been pestering her parents to buy her contact lenses. They didn’t feel that she was quite ready to look after contacts yet, so they told her that they would consider buying her contacts when she was 14. Apparently, her eye doctor was in favor of her getting contacts because he thought they she would have better corrected eyesight when wearing them. She told me that her corrected vision with glasses was barely 20/40 and with contacts she would likely get to 20/30 or maybe even 20/25. I had no idea what my corrected vision with glasses was, but I had no problem reading the smallest line the doctor had me try to read when I had my eyes checked and Vanessa told me that likely meant I could see 20/20. Vanessa had recently gotten new glasses and they looked very nice on her face. They even looked thinner than her old ones were, and she told me that her parents had bought her the thinnest plastic lenses that were available. She let me try them on and I could tell that they were quite a bit stronger than the pair she had given me, but she did not know what her new prescription was. I had saved my birthday money and my allowance money for ages. I even had saved some of my lunch money, as there were some days that I ate less than I usually did. By doing this I had saved up almost $500.00, and that was stoking a flame in my mind. If I was to go into an optical store wearing Vanessa’s old glasses, could I ask them to make me a new pair in the same frame I had for my own glasses? And if I did that would the new thinner lenses look much thicker than the ones in my own glasses? I had been wearing Vanessa’s glasses as much and as often as I possibly could and now, 6 months after having my own glasses I knew that they were not strong enough for my eyes anymore. If I were to have my eyes tested again, and if I got new glasses with the regular plastic lenses again would the difference be something people would notice? I decided to put my idea to the test. I wore Vanessa’s glasses into an optical store and asked the girl if she could duplicate my lenses into a new frame. This was not such a good idea after all. She asked me tons of questions and when I told her that my prescription was over a year old, she told me that I had to have a prescription that was less than a year old before she could do anything. The one good thing was that she had asked me how strong my glasses were and when I told her that I didn’t know she asked me to take them off so she could check the prescription. She had written it down on a piece of paper and while she didn’t give me the paper, I could read it upside down and she had written -16.00D for both eyes. Now I knew that the prescription in Vanessa’s old glasses was -16.00D, however I didn’t know what I was going to do with that knowledge. That night when I got home, I searched on the internet for online glasses suppliers. There were 3 that would supply me a pair of glasses in a prescription of -16.00D using 1.74 hi index plastic lenses. And the best thing about this was that the glasses would come in the mail within around 3 weeks for a total cost of under $300.00. The only thing I had to do was to find out what the distance between my pupils was and there were suggestions on one of the web sites as to how to do this. I followed the suggestions and I managed to come up with 62mm as my pd. I wasn’t worried about my parents finding out that I had ordered myself a pair of glasses as I was always home long before they were, and the postman would have delivered a parcel that would be waiting for me. The only remaining problem was that a credit card was needed, and I solved that by purchasing a prepaid credit card for $300.00. At the last moment, as I was ordering my new strong glasses, I changed the prescription from a -16D prescription to a -17D. I knew what I was doing was wrong. I was destroying my eyesight at the age of almost 10. But Vanessa, who was now almost 13 didn’t seem to have any problems by being very nearsighted, and I just loved the look of her thicker glasses so much my mind couldn’t stop thinking about how great it would be if I had glasses as strong as Vanessa’s were. I needed to have my eyes tested again, because I knew I needed glasses that were stronger than the -4.50D ones that were my current legitimately prescribed ones and I promised myself that if I was able to wear the new glasses that I had ordered online I would wear them all the time and I would be satisfied with them forever. Before my new online glasses arrived, I told my mom I needed an eye exam. She let me set up my own appointment because, as she said, I had done it all by myself the first time. This time I made my appointment for right after school, as I planned to wear Vanessa’s old glasses from the time I left for school in the morning until a few minutes before I walked into the eye doctor’s office. I was not afraid that I would be caught, because I had been wearing Vanessa’s glasses to school all day for about 3 months now, and no one had noticed a thing – or if they had no one had said anything. I actually could not see very well when I tried to wear my own glasses and the writing of the teacher on the board was nothing but a blur. I put my own glasses on just down the street from my eye doctor’s office and noticed immediately that I could not see much of anything. I hoped that my eye doctor would not be too upset that I had not come in earlier, but if he said anything, I would just tell him that my eyes seemed to get much worse all of a sudden. The visit to the doctor was much the same as the first visit, but this time there were a lot more clicks of the big machine with all the lenses in it before the chart on the wall got clear enough for me to read it. And the letters seemed to be quite tiny, but I already knew that as the lenses got a lot stronger everything looked smaller. I left the doctor’s office with a new prescription of -11.50D and an admonishment from the doctor for not coming to see him sooner. He even made me promise to come back in 6 months for another exam. Mom had given me her credit card and had told me to go to the same optical store we had gone to before to order my new glasses. It was a decent walk from the eye doctor’s office to the store and I was forced to put Vanessa’s old glasses on so that I could properly see where I was going. I put my own glasses back on when I got to a point where I could see the store and when I went inside the darkness of the store really made things impossible for me to see. Even being unable to see properly did not stop me from finding a frame that was almost identical to the one I had ordered online and while the optician told me it would take a couple of weeks to get my new glasses because the lenses had to be a special order I did not panic because I had Vanessa’s old glasses that I could wear. I did not know what I was going to do at home though, because my own glasses were really too weak to even wear as they did not help me at all anymore. I let the optician talk me into ordering 1.67 index lenses for my new glasses because she said that they could not get regular plastic for a prescription as strong as mine now was. As I walked home wearing Vanessa’s old glasses I came up with an idea. I was going to tell my parents that because my eyesight was so much worse than my old glasses could correct the optician had searched through the old eyeglasses donation box and had found this pair that I could wear until my new ones came in. They accepted that explanation and I was then able to wear Vanessa’s old glasses full time until my new ones were ready. The only time I was going to have to wear my own glasses was going to be the day that I went into the optical store to pick up my new glasses. Plans are not always perfect though. My new online -17.00D glasses came in about a week after I had ordered my new glasses and like someone who is too smart for their own good, I started wearing them to school immediately. The extra -1D was very easy to get accustomed to and I had worn the online glasses full time for over a week before I got the call that my new glasses were ready. I went to the store to pick them up, putting my own old glasses on just before I got there. I really couldn’t see with them on as they were next to useless. When the girl brought my new glasses to me and I put them on everything was blurry. She asked me to read something on the other side of the room and I couldn’t see it at all. She then called my doctor’s office and they wanted me to come right over. It took me 20 minutes to walk to the doctor’s office. The girl at the optician’s had given me the new glasses but for the walk I put my online glasses back on, only changing them as I came near the eye doctor’s office. They put me through all the same tests again, but this time the doctor gave me some drops that paralyzed my eye muscles. Now, in only 2 weeks my glasses needed to have a prescription of -13.50D. The doctor’s office called the optician and told them to order me new lenses of -13.50D and they would pay for them, so I didn’t have to go back there that afternoon. But now the eye doctor wanted to see me in 3 months instead of 6. I didn’t know what to tell my parents. I was still wearing Vanessa’s old glasses at home, and everyone at school had seen me wearing my new -17.00D glasses. Vanessa’s old glasses were now so easy for me to wear that they felt almost perfect for my eyes. And my new -17D online glasses only tugged at my eyes a little bit. I could have just told my parents that the -17D glasses were my new ones, but something in my gut stopped me from telling them that. It would be just my luck if the eye doctor’s office called my mom because the doctor had seemed very concerned about the fact that my actual prescription had climbed -2D in only 2 weeks. It would be better if I just kept wearing Vanessa’s old glasses until my new -13.50D lenses came in. I was a little nervous for the next couple of weeks until I received a call from the optician saying that my new lenses were in and could be fitted to my glasses. I went there that night after school and when I left there my vision was just OK with my own prescribed -13.50D lenses. I knew it wouldn’t take long before these glasses were too weak. In 3 months when I went back my prescription had increased to -15.00D. I did not bother having my lenses changed in that frame as I did not want to tell my parents that my eyes had gotten worse. Anyway, I was wearing the online glasses with the -17D lenses and didn’t need to waste money on new lenses. Then when I went back for my next 3-month checkup my prescription had increased to -16.50D. The -17D glasses were going to be just fine for a while longer. My cousin Vanessa had turned 14 and as they had promised her parents had bought her contact lenses. She wasn’t as thrilled with being a contact lens wearer as she had thought she would be. They were fine once she got them into her eyes, but she had trouble inserting them. And she had to blink a lot, so she was always blinking her eyes. She was really surprised that my eyes had gotten so bad, but she had been very good about keeping my secret about me wanting to wear glasses and also of me wearing her old glasses. Her newest pair of glasses now had a prescription of -22.50D and they had circles in the lenses. I liked the looks of them, and she told me they were called myodiscs. I tried them on, and I could wear them fairly easily. I could see much better through the pair she wore before the myodiscs, and the pair before that was really easy for me to wear. Vanessa willingly gave me that pair to wear, as I think she liked the fact that she was not the only one in the family to have terrible eyesight and needed strong glasses. I did wear Vanessa’s other glasses a lot. They were a bit stronger than the -17D ones I had bought online but were very easy for me to wear. No one even noticed that the lenses were stronger, and I think all my classmates just thought I had 2 pairs of glasses. I had been prescribed -15D lenses by my eye doctor, but I had not upgraded my own glasses to this prescription and now I really needed to have a new eye exam. The only thing I could think of was to break my own glasses, and then I could suggest to my parents that maybe I could borrow an old pair of Vanessa’s. They thought that Vanessa’s glasses would be far too strong for me, but my mom took me over to her sister in law’s place and we got Vanessa to lend me the same pair of -16D glasses I had originally borrowed from her and had returned. My mom was horrified that my eyes were almost as bad as Vanessa’s were. When I did have my eyes examined my own new prescription was just a little stronger than the -17D glasses I had purchased online. I had brought the other stronger glasses I had gotten from Vanessa and I told the doctor when he was checking my eyes that I had also been wearing another, slightly stronger pair of my cousin’s old glasses and that they gave me really good vision. He wanted to see them, and I am pretty sure that he checked the prescription in those lenses. Then he came back and adjusted the lenses that he had in the machine in front of my eyes. I felt that the new lenses were a little stronger, but I could see the chart quite well. Then he took a big box of lenses and put some of the lenses into a funny frame, which he then put on my face. He told me to walk around with that frame on for a while and then he would check my eyes again. I went out into the waiting room and looked at new frames for a while. Then I sat down and read a couple of magazines. Finally, the doctor brought me back in to his examination room and he asked me how everything looked. I told him that everything was fine, so he tested me with what I figured was the same lenses that were in the funny frame. I could read every line he asked me to read, and I think I got all the letters correct. The doctor gave me the stronger pair of Vanessa’s glasses and told me that I could wear them until my own new glasses came in. Mom had left me there while she went shopping but when I came out the second time, she was sitting waiting for me. The doctor came out with me and he called her name, so she got up and came over to talk with him. I couldn’t hear everything they talked about, but I remember him saying something about the strongest prescription he had ever seen in an 11-year-old, and that it appeared that I had a serious case of progressive myopia. I heard Mom ask if anything could be done to stop my eyes from getting worse and the doctor told her that we would just have to wait and see how much worse my eyesight would get. I knew that Vanessa had a stronger prescription than me and she did just fine, so I really wasn’t worried. But mom was and she was almost crying when she helped me pick out a new frame for my now -19D prescription. I resolved right then and there that this was it. I was only going to wear my own prescribed glasses from then on. I certainly hoped that she would never find out that I had accelerated my climb into very high myopia by wearing my cousin’s glasses. I had only started trying to make my eyes nearsighted when I was 7, and I had gotten my first pair of glasses when I was 8 so to go from a -4.50D prescription at age 8 to a -19D prescription by age 11 really was an increase in myopia to for mom to be worried about. That night I heard my mom and dad talking about my eyesight. Mom was blaming dad for the genetics because Vanessa was his sister’s child. I felt badly that dad was getting blamed for something that he hadn’t had a thing to do with, but I certainly didn’t feel bad enough to go into the living room and tell them what I had done. It did strengthen my resolve to leave well enough alone from now on. If my eyes got any worse, then I would need stronger glasses, but I wasn’t going to push it anymore. When I graduated from high school Vanessa wore a prescription of around -25D in her glasses. My eyes had gotten worse on their own over the past few years without any help from me. Now I needed a prescription of -27.50D and I still had 3 more years of college to get through. I still loved wearing glasses though, and I did not mind that I was the girl with the thickest glasses anywhere I went. I had tried contact lenses at one point, but while they gave me a little better visual acuity it wasn’t enough of a difference to make me want to go through the grief and aggravation of putting them in and taking them out all the time. I had gone out with a couple of guys that had actually chosen to go out with me because of my strong glasses and I was all right with that. I had never intended to have my glasses become stronger than Vanessa’s But, my plans had gone just a little bit too far. Specs4ever August 2019
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