I have lots of unfinished stories in various states of completion. Some need just the creativity and inspiration to devise a suitable ending; others seemed like a good idea at the time but fizzled out before the plot properly developed. And I feel anything I write will be feeble compared to the excellent stories posted by the likes of Andrew and the incomparable and wonderfully prolific Specs4ever. But the increased amount of free time arising from the current lockdown allowed me to think about a story which, I thought didn’t really need an ending. It may be a little dark for some tastes and you may think it far-fetched. But if I had six months ago described the situation the world currently finds itself in, you’d have said that was far-fetched.
Had Mary not been wearing her glasses the first time I saw her, it is possible I would not have spoken to her. I had always, as long as I could remember, had a fondness for girls who wear glasses. Well, most girls. Basically, the stronger the prescription better I liked them. So perfection for me would be a girl wearing myodiscs or, even better, lenticular lenses. I desperately wanted to wear thick glasses myself and so was perpetually disappointed that my myopia was only a few dioptres. The only glasses I found boring were plano or weak plus lenses such as reading glasses. Of course, young ladies wearing glasses with myodisc or lenticular lenses were extremely rare and, when Mary sat down beside me in the waiting area of my opticians as I waited for my appointment, her glasses had enough plus prescription in them to interest me. She was quite a large girl, moderately attractive without being beautiful, with a figure that looked ‘comfortable’. Thus attracted, I started to chat her up and having established that she had taken the afternoon off work for her own appointment, I decided to do the same and persuaded her to come for a coffee with me after our two appointments. That went well enough and I persuaded her out on a date the following weekend. When she turned up for the date she wasn’t wearing her glasses, much to my disappointment. It turned out that she had only been wearing her glasses for her eye test because she had been specifically told not to wear her contact lenses that day. Mary believed she was more attractive wearing her contacts than her glasses. This was far from the case as when bare-eyed her eyes looked too small and close together. I told her she looked good wearing her glasses but she was not persuaded. We did, however, agree that next time we met we would together help each other to choose new glasses, even though Mary told me she was not prepared to spend much money on hers as she would only wear them about the house. We started dating regularly and in that time I never saw her wearing her glasses. I gathered she did wear them at home to give her eyes a rest from contact lenses and that was a factor in my enthusiasm for her to move in with me. When I eventually persuaded her, she still continued to wear her contact lenses to work every day, and whenever we went out, but I was content for her to switch back to her glasses in the evening and at weekends when she was at home. Mary and I had been living together for about a year when the world-wide Covid-19 pandemic emerged from China at the beginning of 2020. Neither of us caught it, or if we did catch it we were among those who developed no symptoms, and were unaware of having it. It was well into 2021 before the first vaccines became available in sufficient quantities to inoculate the general public. By this time it had been established that any immunity you got from having had the virus did not last long and we would all need to be inoculated annually if the virus was to be kept at bay. There were a number of different vaccines developed by competing pharmaceutical companies and you had no say in which particular vaccine you got. In any case, most members of the general public would not have had enough knowledge to be able to make an informed choice, even if it had been open to them. We were assured that the vaccines had been thoroughly tested before being released, but in reality the testing lasted at most only a few months, such was the pressure to have the vaccines available and get the world’s economies moving again. Mary and I were both vaccinated at the same time and we then became more relaxed, believing that we were reasonably safe from catching the virus for at least a year. It was early in 2022 that I began to notice my hearing seemed to be dull, almost as if I had wax in my ears. I consulted my GP who looked and told me that ear-wax was not the problem and referred me to an audiologist who confirmed I had a ‘moderate’ hearing loss. She could not say why this had developed and told me the only help she could offer was hearing aids. Within a fortnight I had been fitted with two standard National Health pink behind-the-ear hearing aids. These took a little getting used to and initially I was rather shy about wearing them in public but Mary was in favour of my wearing them because she said when I didn’t wear them I was constantly asking her to repeat herself and assured me my work colleagues would be just as irritated. Within a few weeks I was a wearing them more or less all my waking hours and I am now utterly dependent on hearing aids. About the same time I began to feel I wasn’t seeing so well and arranged for an eye test, thinking I might need new glasses. The opticiian confirmed I did indeed need an increase in my prescription as my myopia had increased by almost two dioptres. This both pleased and at the same time surprised me. I was slightly shocked rather than merely surprised when she told me that the reason for the increase was probably that I was developing cataracts in both eyes. She explained that they were not yet quite at the stage where they would require to be removed but they soon would be, so she would immediately put me on the waiting list for surgery. And meantime she wanted so see me again in 3 months if I had not been to see a consultant by that time. When I told Mary about this her first question was “Does that mean you won’t need glasses any more?”. It was as if she thought that was a benefit. “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it.” In fact, I had thought about it. “As far as I know, once you’ve had cataract surgery you lose your powers of accommodation, so if you don’t need glasses for distance you will need them for reading and if you can read without glasses you will need them for distance. So I suppose I probably would prefer to be just like I am now except I will need bifocal or varifocal lenses in my glasses. I wouldn’t want to be fumbling for reading glasses every time I want to see something up close.” Actually, I really wanted no implants at all because I thought that might mean I would have a prescription a bit like Mary’s but I realised that such a request would seem bizarre. Apart from asking when the surgery would actually happen, a question to which I didn’t at that stage know the answer, she left it at that. When I got my new stronger glasses I was pleased that my vision was better, although still not good in poor light or in the dark, and also that the lenses felt and looked stronger. They were, after all, almost double the strength of my previous glasses. I got an appointment with a consultant at our local hospital after about 6 weeks. Fortunately by this time our NHS had largely caught up on the backlog of non-emergency surgery which had built up during the pandemic. By then, some of the improvement in my vision from when I got my new stronger glasses seemed to have gone and he told me that my cataracts now justified surgery and I would be immediately put on the waiting list. He then asked me the question I had been worrying about. Did I want to ‘do away with’ the need for glasses for distance vision? I plucked up courage and asked him whether I could do without implants altogether on the pretext that it would make the surgery simpler. He put on a serious face and told me that implants were routine, he did them many times a day and that, although I was currently ‘slightly myopic’ my uncorrected vision without implants would be ‘very poor’ and that I would not like the vision with the ‘strong magnifying’ lenses I would need. He personally would not accede to my wishes. If I wanted to look for another surgeon to do it I was welcome, but it could add months of delay. I had to decide on the spot and settled for remaining ‘slightly myopic’. As is the usual practice, I was to have one eye done some weeks before the other, in case of complications. In my case my right eye, whose cataract was further advanced, would be done first. I knew roughly what to expect and Mary picked me up late afternoon from the hospital. I remember thinking on the way home that Mary’s driving seemed a little erratic. It had been some time since she had driven me; normally when we were together I would drive. She didn’t seem to anticipate traffic movements ahead of her and there were a few rather fierce stops. I didn’t want to bang my head and risk damage to my eye. Once home, I religiously put in the eye drops as instructed and kept on the eye shield. I had expected some pain but I was surprised how painful it was. Also, the blurring did not seem to get better; indeed it seemed to get worse. After three days of increasing pain and blurriness I phoned the hospital and was told to come back. They administered some different eyedrops and kept me in. They must have given me stronger painkillers because the pain eased, but my vision didn’t improve. After a few days the consultant came to see me and told me that it appeared that I was allergic to the material of the implanted lens and that they would have to remove the lens. In a sense I had got my wish but he counselled that it was probable there would be considerable permanent damage to the eye and I may lose all or most of my vision in that eye. As the vision in my left eye was fading fast, he assured me that the cataract surgery for that eye would be fast-tracked and there was no question of them attempting a lens implant. They did remove the implanted lens that same day but I never saw anything more out of that eye. It had apparently become so badly inflamed and infected that the damage was irreversible. The consultant who gave me this verdict advised me that, as the eye was beyond saving and, even if the inflammation and infection cleared up there was a risk of re-infection passing to my ‘good’ eye and he recommended that I have the eye removed before operating on my other eye. I saw no point in arguing with him. I spent a difficult few weeks with very limited vision until my left eye was operated on. I was interested to find out what prescription my glasses would be after the removal of my natural lens. I had read up a bit about cataracts and it seemed that the average increase in prescription after removal of the natural lens was about +11 dioptres. If I deducted my current prescription of -4 dioptres that would possibly give me only +7 dioptres. But the -4 prescription was as a result of the cataracts, so maybe my natural prescription was only -2 dioptres which would give potentially +9 dioptres. That was nearly as high as Mary who I knew was + 10 dioptres and I really liked the look of the lenses in her glasses and I looked forward to possibly finding out what her vision was like with her glasses. Except, of course, that she had two eyes In the event, it was a bit higher than my expectation and I now wear +12 dioptre glasses for distance and I have a reading add of 4 dioptres. It took me a while to get used to how big everything looked and my greatly reduced field of vision. I began to realise why Mary preferred to wear her contact lenses. I started off wearing a ‘clouded’ lens on my right eye as I didn’t like the look of an eyepatch. Later Iwas been fitted with a prosthetic eye and my glasses now look more or less normal, albeit the lenses are quite thick. More or less as soon as I got home from the hospital after the surgery on my left eye, I noticed that Mary seemed to be asking me to repeat myself quite a lot. When I first mentioned this to her she denied it and was rather bad-tempered, which was not like her. I put it down to my condition. In just a few months I had become totally dependent on hearing aids and one-eyed and blind without my thick-lensed glasses. But a few days later Mary apologised to me and admitted that she herself had noticed she did not seem to be hearing very well. She had been wearing her glasses full-time for a few days, which was also not like her. She explained that her contact lenses were hurting her and her vision was blurry. This was getting very odd. We booked appointments for her with both our GP and the optician and I started to do some investigation. I found that there was a story on the internet suggesting that some people who had been given one particular vaccine against Covid-19 were showing symptoms like mine – hearing loss, the formation of cataracts and allergy to most types of lens implants and contact lenses. I didn’t tell Mary this at first as I didn’t want her fearing the worst any longer than necessary and, I thought, you never know, maybe she wouldn’t get these symptoms and this was just a coincidence, although I didn’t really believe that. The audiologist confirmed she had significant hearing loss and ordered her hearing aids and the optician confirmed she had well-developed cataracts, told her not to think of wearing contact lenses and referred her to the hospital for surgery. Mary was, not surprisingly distraught. She was naturally a little more vain than me and was upset at having to wear hearing aids which she thought were only for ‘old people’. “Will I have the same trouble as you with my cataracts”? “I doubt it” I replied. “I don’t think they’ll suggest lens implants for you.” “That means I’m stuck with contact lenses or glasses.” “I think so.” I did not mention that her glasses were likely to be a lot stronger than her present ones or that she would be unable to wear contact lenses, leaving her to discover that for herself in due course. Within two weeks, Mary was wearing two behind the ear hearing aids. At first she moaned a bit about them being uncomfortable but after a few weeks she stopped moaning and seemed to just accept that her hearing, which was by now quite poor without them, was better when she wore them. She was, though, hiding them under her hair, despite my telling her that people would speak more clearly to her if they saw she was wearing hearing aids. A few weeks later she went into the hospital to have her first cataract removed. The surgeon explained that because of problems with rejection of implants, he would not attempt these. This would mean a ‘significant change’ to her glasses prescription and, as she would have the other eye done quite soon, within a few weeks, it would be sensible for her to manage just with one eye until then and have her new spectacles made up when both eyes had been done. Mary still didn’t seem to appreciate what her new glasses would be like. When she asked me I just told her that they might be ‘a bit stronger’. “I think they’re strong enough already. I don’t want them any stronger.” “The important thing is, you’ll be able to see clearly again when you have both eyes done.” The surgery on Mary’s first eye was successful with no obvious problems and she soldiered on with dimming vision in her other eye for a few weeks until she was called in to have that one done. Then, a few days later, came the day of reckoning when she reported to the optician to have her refraction. Her new prescription for distance was +22 dioptres for her left eye and +24 dioptres for the right. The optician explained that the lenses of her glasses would have to be lenticular. “What does that mean?” asked Mary. “If we filled the entire area of the lens of your glasses with your prescription the lens would be very thick and heavy, so we make the prescription area smaller than the width of the lens. You might think that would reduce your field of vision but in practice even if the prescription filled the full field of the lens you would not see much through the outer edges of the lens anyway due to the distortion. It may take you a while to get used to the smaller field of vision you will have. You will learn to move your head rather than your eyes, so that you are always looking through the centre of the lens.” I don’t think Mary was taking much of this in but I nodded to show that I understood what she was saying. Mary, of course, was virtually blind at this point, her old glasses now of little use to her. I chose her frames, a simple gold metal rectangular shape and told her the thin earpieces would fit well under her hearing aids. I don’t think she was happy at the thought that her choice of glasses frames would be restricted due to her need to wear hearing aids. For the few days while we waited for her glasses to arrive I tried to keep her spirits up by telling her how good it would be to see again, but I was really dreading the moment when she put the glasses on and realised what her vision was like and what the glasses looked like. My fears were entirely justified. Mary became almost hysterical when the optician placed the glasses on her face and she saw herself in the mirror. “Hideous”, ”bug eyes”, “coke bottles” were just some of the unflattering terms she used. “But Darling, there’s no point in getting yourself worked up. No-one but you thinks that. And these glasses are what you need to see. You can hardly go around without glasses, can you? Let me help you out to the taxi and we can talk about it calmly when we get home.” Mary needed almost as much help to get in and out of the taxi on the way home as she had on the way to the optician’s, when she was essentially blind. When we got home I left her to begin getting acclimatised to her new vision while I rustled up a meal. When it was ready I had to guide her to the table and into her seat and almost had to feed her. Afterwards I guided her to the sofa and we sat down to watch a little TV. I turned on the subtitles and asked Mary if she could read them. She said she could. “There you are, you see. Your eyesight is not so bad after all. It’s just that your new prescription is quite a bit different and it will take time to get used to it. But I’ll be around to help you whenever you need me.” “But I look hideous.” “Oh, no you don’t! I suggest we have an early night” I guided her upstairs and let her undress. When she was naked she was just about to remove her glasses when I stopped her. “Let’s keep our glasses on” I said. “I want to see my beautiful wife while I make love to her.” So we kept on our glasses and hearing aids and I think I gave Mary the best sex we had ever had together. Mary’s acclimatisation to her new glasses was very slow and far from complete. She is very reluctant to leave the house other than for her walk to the local station and from station to office at the other end on the days when she is not working from home.. She allows twice as long for the walk as she did before and this means getting an earlier train. She will not venture into unfamiliar territory without me. “You know, Mike” she said to me one night after we had sex “the only consolation of all this is that I do believe you find me sexier with these glasses.” “Well, I always told you you were prettier wearing your glasses but you didn’t believe me. But it’s true.” It was only a week after Mary had got her new glasses that I asked her to marry me. “If you can accept being married to a deaf one-eyed fellow with glasses” I added. Her response was “Wearing these” pointing to her own glasses “have I any choice?” “Oh yes, you have a choice. You’re a very desirable and attractive woman.” But she said yes anyway. I had always thought that Mary wearing her glasses was gorgeous. Now that she was wearing glasses with lenticular lenses, she was irresistible, and I wanted to marry her to make sure she was mine. As large gatherings were still prohibited because of the Covid pandemic at that time, our wedding was a very low-key affair; just the two of us and my brother and Mary’s sister as witnesses. That is probably what Mary would have wanted anyway in the circumstances. Mary’s sister Jo is, as Mary was, a reluctant wearer of glasses, with a medium plus prescription similar to what Mary had before. I persuaded her that it would make Mary feel more comfortable if she wore her glasses for the wedding ceremony. Mary had worn her hair short all the time I had known her but since she had been forced to wear hearing aids she had been trying to let it grow, so that she could hide her hearing aids under her hair. I believed this was a bad idea, and told her so, as she quite often had difficulty in hearing other people speak to her and I felt that if people saw she was wearing hearing aids they would speak more clearly and loudly and she would not have to ask them to repeat themselves. Mary seemed to accept this, so I was rather shocked when, after the wedding vows had been witnessed, she told me she was going to take off her glasses and hearing aids for the photographs. “Whatever for?” “Because I want to look my best.” “But you do look your best. You’re gorgeous. Look, the Mike and Mary who wear hearing aids and glasses are the real thing. That’s what they look like now. The old Mary who wore contact lenses and didn’t need hearing aids doesn’t exist any more. The same with Mike. So any pictures which don’t show us wearing our hearing aids and our glasses are fraudulent. They don’t show the truth. When I asked you to marry me, you were wearing your glasses and hearing aids. That’s the person I married. So let’s have the pictures as we are, of the real us, not some make-believe couple.” I think Mary was a little taken aback by the earnestness of my argument and fortunately she relented, so the wedding photos show us we now are. It was not long after our wedding when we discovered Mary was pregnant. Around this time a loose organisation was being set up to link all the people who were known to have had the same issues following the vaccination as Mary and I had. That particular vaccine had been launched in our local area first and so most of the people who had suffered cataracts and hearing loss were also in our area. Once the side effects had become known, that particular vaccine was quickly withdrawn. So we got used to seeing occasional people around our city wearing thick plus glasses and hearing aids and assumed they were in the same boat as ourselves. The main purpose of the group seemed to be to consider whether we should collectively sue someone or other for damages – the vaccine manufacturer or the Health Service or the government – it wasn’t entirely clear. A meeting was called to discuss the matter and Mary and I went along. The lady organising the meeting was herself wearing quite large hearing aids and glasses which seemed to be about as strong as mine, which seemed to be about average for the group. Of the other couples there, most had only one member with plus glasses and hearing aids, the other being there for moral support or as a guide. There were a number of singles, too, and the age range seemed to be from about age 20 upwards, so Mary and I were among the younger attendees. We were all invited to subscribe some funds to pay for a legal opinion on the chances of success and enough money was raised to give the go-ahead on this. A further meeting would take place to receive and discuss the lawyers report. At this further meeting a month or so later, we heard a report for a lawyer who explained that, as the vaccine manufacturers were producing the vaccine at cost and making no profit, there was no evidence that the testing had thrown up any of the side effects we had experienced, and there was public pressure to have the testing complete as soon as possible so that as many people as possible could be vaccinated as soon as possible, she thought it unlikely that a court would find anyone negligent. After some discussion it was decided to see if any legal firms would take up the case on a pro bono basis, as the legal fees would be otherwise unaffordable. At that meeting we met another couple, Steve and Jane, who were also expecting their first baby. In their case, only Jane had been affected. Her glasses seemed less strong than mine, and she explained that she had previously been rather myopic, but she had, like me, lost an eye and seemed to be quite hard of hearing. We agreed to keep in touch with each other and it was Steve and Jane who put the thought into our heads that no-one knew whether our babies would be affected by the vaccine., although all the scans had so far indicated no problems. We simply did not know. But we did not have to wait long to find out. When our daughter Samantha was born seven weeks premature, the medical staff immediately spotted that she had cataracts and it was not long before she was diagnosed with a hearing loss. Her cataracts were surgically removed within weeks and when the consultant spoke to us he explained that, due to her premature birth, Samantha’s eyes were abnormally small and that she would need very powerful lenses in her glasses. Mary, naturally, was very upset at this news, thinking of her own vision difficulties with her lenticular lenses. “Her glasses won’t be as thick as mine, surely? My vision is terrible.” “They will be stronger, I fear. But the thing to bear in mind is that Samantha will never know any other kind of vision, other than through her lenticular lenses. OK, we may at some time in the future find some material from which we can make lens implants or contact lenses which you and she are not allergic to, but failing that, she will naturally adapt to the vision she gets through her glasses, whereas you have had to adapt overnight, as it were, to a completely different type of vision from what you were used to for 20-odd years.” When Samantha got her glasses, her prescription was a staggering +42 dioptres. At first she tried to knock her hearing aids off and they had to be taped on to hear head, but she never tried to remove her glasses and would usually cry when we took them off. Of course, we could not ignore Jane and Steve, who were anxious to hear about our baby whenever she arrived, and we were conscious that the discovery of Samantha’s hearing and vision issues would worry them. As it turned out, their little son Jamie was born shortly afterwards. He also had cataracts and a hearing loss. He was not premature and his glasses are not as strong as Samantha’s, being similar to Mary’s at about +23 dioptres. At the next meeting of the action group both Jan and Steve and ourselves brought along our babies, so that both partners could attend. We got a lot of sympathy from many of the other members of the group, some of whom thought that what they saw as the babies’ handicaps increased the case for compensation. It was nice to discover that two of the young single members of the group had since become a couple, having met for the first time at the first meeting. Jennifer, the girl, is very pretty and she was sitting beside us, telling us how cute our babies were, with Sam on one knee and Jamie on the other, her eyes beautifully enlarged behind the lenses of her glasses. “You know, before all this” she said, waving a hand briefly in front of her face, presumably to indicate her large, powerful-looking hearing aids and the bulging lenses of her glasses “I was quite vain. I wore contact lenses and would never have dreamed of dating someone like Colin (her new boyfriend) with hearing aids and thick glasses. I would have been terrified of what my friends would think. Which would have been a shame, as I’d never have found out what a lovely person he is. I think I’ve become a better person as a result of this, and I don’t really think I need compensation for that.” I remember thinking at the time that Colin was a very lucky man to have such an attractive and self-aware partner. She then went on to say that if she ever had children she would be content if they were as cute and lively as ‘these two ‘, meaning the two on her lap. The report to the meeting of the group was to the effect that no reputable firm of lawyers could be found who would take our case on a pro bono basis and so we decided to take no further action and the group was disbanded. However, we still keep in touch with Jane and Steve and Jennifer and Colin. We see them quite often. Sam and Jamie get on really well together. They totter around and do tend to trip over and bump into things, especially Samantha, but they just get back to their feet and carry on. We don’t yet know how good their hearing will be but it is obvious that when wearing their hearing aids they do react to sounds, so we are hopeful. Jennifer and Colin are now expecting a baby. Mary and I are probably as used to our new vision as we will ever be. Even though I have only one eye, my vision still seems to be better than Mary’s and when we are out I act as her ‘guide’, especially in crowded area which she finds especially difficult. For a while after our hearing loss was first discovered, our hearing deteriorated quite badly and we feared we might become completely deaf and cochlear implants were talked about. We were fitted with larger, more powerful, hearing aids and, now that the deterioration seems to have slowed, if not totally abated, that threat seems to have receded, at least for now. Mary still looks ravishing, and I get particularly turned on by those quick, bird-like movements of her head she needs to make as she is walking about or working. And as for Samantha, she is our pride and joy and we love her dearly.