I glanced over at my very pregnant wife, sitting in her favorite recliner with her e book reader was held its usual 4 to 5 inches from the front of her -45 diopter glasses. Our one-year-old daughter was playing with some of her dolls, and she was not wearing the new glasses we just picked up from the optician a few days ago. She had been very obstinate about putting them on and every time I tried to place them on her nose, she would take them off and tell me ‘No dada no!” I just wasn’t sure what I should do, and my wife was leaving everything up to me, so rather than arguing or fighting with my daughter I decided to just let her be and she could decide when she needed to see well enough to be willing to wear her glasses.
After my wife and I had married we stayed in Tumbledown, a town of about 20,000 inhabitants in the Pacific mountains where our families had lived our whole life. There is a highway that comes into town, but if you want to go through the high mountain pass to the other side you need a 4 wheel drive, high clearance vehicle, and even then, depending on rockslides, you may be stranded. That road out of town is posted with signs that read “travel at your own risk”, and another that says if you are stranded the cost of rescue will be your responsibility. As a result, there are very few people who try to take that route to get though Sunshine Pass. Because of our isolation and because the road effectively dead ends at the edge of town, the only people who really come here are people who belong here, and that is just fine with most of the folks living here.
My wife and I, as I mentioned, had grown up in Tumbledown. I was a year older, and a grade ahead of Alicia all through our school years. We had dated throughout high school and after graduation I had asked Alicia to marry me. She agreed, and like most of the other girls that also attended Tumbledown High, she quit school as soon as she graduated. Once a girl from Tumbledown found herself a husband there really was no reason for her to continue with her schooling, and there were enough girls who did graduate that we always had enough secretaries, receptionists, nurses, teachers and librarians. By the time graduation came around there were very few girls in Tumbledown that had a glasses prescription of less than -20D for their glasses. Alecia was one of the special ones, who had their prescription climb well past the -20D that most girls ended up with and just by marrying Alecia, one of the most myopic girls in town, my status had been elevated considerably.
But I was in a bit of a quandary. Our daughter Bianca had recently been prescribed glasses with a prescription of -3.00D and the town eye doctor, Dr. Belson, had recommended that Bianca should wear her glasses full time so she could get used to them. But as far as I could tell, Bianca had no problem seeing things over on the other side of the room and she absolutely refused to wear her glasses. I am one of the maintenance people who work for the town, and one of my jobs consists of repairing things at our library. One section of the library is pretty much hidden from the rest of the library and is accessible only by the librarians who will go in and retrieve books should the reader have the permission of the town council to read them.
A few months before Bianca was born, I had been doing repairs to some of the stacks. Some shelving had come loose and needed reinforcing along with shelf replacement where necessary. That is how I discovered that there was a whole section of books on eyes, vison problems and also a number of books on myopia that was forbidden for the general public to access. I am quite a reader, as well as a very curious person, and when I discovered these hidden books, I decided I would find out why these books were not available to other people without special permission. Over the past year I had managed to sneak out and read about half of the books, and what I had discovered was astonishing to me. I do not know what you personally know about myopia. It is generally thought to be an aberration of the eye, whereby the eye grows longer from front to back. When this happens, the eye is no longer a perfect sphere. It becomes more like an egg shape or like a football, and when this occurs the 2 lenses – the cornea and the inner lens that focus the eye no longer can focus a clear image on the macula at the rear of the eye. This results in a blurry image being cast upon the macula. A normal spherical eye is around 24mm. A lot of the ladies in Tumbledown, including my own sister, had prescriptions of -24D, and one of the books I had been reading suggested that this meant that their extremely nearsighted eyes now were around 36mm long. My wife, with her - 45D prescription would, according to what I read, have an eyeball that was around 40mm. I knew that her prescription was extremely high, and that when Dr. Belson examined her eyes he usually did so by holding weak trial lenses in front of her glasses to see if the slightly stronger prescription that an extra -1D or -2D trial lens gave her would be satisfactory, as none of the machines that Dr. Beldon used could go high enough to refract my wife properly. With her extremely high prescription she had very few choices when it came to the lenses of her glasses, and we had to take what they would supply for her.
I had never really thought much about my wife’s eyesight. I knew that her uncorrected vision was such that she could not even see her glasses clearly enough to clean the lenses when she held them in her hand. And when she was putting them on, she could not see through the lenses with any clarity until she brought them tight to the bridge of her nose. But she never took her glasses off, and she was actually proud of the fact that she wore one of the strongest pairs of glasses in Tumbledown. Martha Dunweiler was the name of the lady who wore the strongest glasses in Tumbledown, and I am pretty sure her prescription was right around -70D. Betsy Smithers was the other lady who had a strong prescription, and she wore glasses with a prescription in the high minus 50’s. My wife, with her -45D prescription had the third highest prescription in town. I don’t know how suitable Martha or Betsy’s eyesight was with their glasses on, but I do know that my wife had very good visual acuity as long as her glasses were set in the proper place on her nose. As a result, Alecia was often used as an example of someone who could see very well, even with her strong prescription.
Of all the women in our town I would guess that between 85 and 90% of them wore glasses with a prescription of over -20D. The reverse was true for the men. I would speculate that 85 to 90% of the men under 50 did not wear glasses at all, and of the 10 to 15% who did I doubt that there was anyone who had a minus prescription of more than a -6D. Most of the men who wore glasses required plus lenses for their glasses. Until I had found all those forbidden books in the stacks the fact that the girls wore strong glasses, and the men did not was just something that was accepted by everyone. After all, the men were the ones that went out to work every day, and most of the women stayed home raising the children, which meant that they did not require really good eyesight. Since Tumbledown was so isolated if the women had worked outside the home there would not likely be enough paying jobs for all the men. The ladies not only looked after the children, but they also sewed clothing, baked everything they could from scratch, cleaned their own homes and many other things that the ladies in the rest of the country no longer even thought of doing. Almost everyone in Tumbledown recycled everything. Even the old, weaker glasses the older ladies grew out of were often given to younger girls as they grew to need stronger and stronger prescriptions. And most families in Tumbledown had at least 4 children, as that was the only way the town would survive.
But some of the things I had been reading in the forbidden books had been weighing heavily on my mind. I had read about studies that were done with very young primates, and by putting strong minus lenses in front of their eyes for an extended period of time it had been discovered that these primates became as nearsighted as the lenses that had been put on them. Even fowl had been proven to develop myopia if they were forced to wear minus lenses. I also discovered that a young child has a lot of accommodation – as much as 10 diopters plus or minus during their formative years. That sort of lead me to believe that if young children were forced to wear glasses with minus lenses, they would accommodate and likely become myopic. From what I had been reading I deduced that if a young girl wore glasses with a -3D prescription, within a year they were likely to become at least as myopic as -2.50D. And then if they were then forced to wear – and maybe forced is too strong a word here – a prescription of -5.50D in their glasses within a year or so they would then actually need a -5.00D prescription. Then, if the -5.50D glasses were taken away from them and replaced with -8.00D glasses they would not be able to object because they would not be able to see well enough to function without any glasses. Now they would not be forced to wear the glasses but would wear them willingly because the other choice was to go around in a blurry fog. I read that someone needing a -4D prescription required the person to bring their reading material to within about 8” of their eyes. With a -7.50D prescription this was reduced to about 6” and then with a -10D prescription they would need to bring things to about 4” to see clearly. My wife, with her -45D prescription brought her reading material to within 4 to 5” from her glasses, but everything was so minimized by her strong prescription that she had to do this to read. But by doing this and reading through the strong lenses of her glasses she was actually creating pressure on her eyes that could eventually make them elongate even further.
Now I had questions that needed to be answered, but I was not supposed to have read any of the books in the forbidden section of the library. I was not supposed to have figured out that forcing a child to wear minus lenses from the age of 1 would begin to create significant myopia. I was not supposed to know that a child should be out playing in the sunshine instead of looking at and coloring pictures in books in a dark house. A child should not be constantly coloring or doing anything up close for extended periods of time, nor should they be wearing glasses while they did any close work. And they should take frequent breaks from any close work to focus on things that were at least 20 feet away. Bianca was just barely walking. And while some of the children of our friends were already wearing glasses without any protest, Bianca really didn’t seem to want to wear her -3D glasses. Was it possible that she did not need glasses? Was it possible that Alicia had been forced to wear her first glasses at age 1, and had then been given stronger and stronger glasses until she was the third most nearsighted lady in Tumbledown? I did not want that fate for my daughter, and if by chance we had 3 more daughter’s I didn’t want them to be forced into being myopic.
I really did not know what to do. I had an old pair of safety glasses that had rather thick lenses, although they had no prescription and since I had plenty of newer ones, I took the lenses out of the frame. I then took a Dremel tool, and I shaped the nonprescription safety lenses to a slightly larger size then the -3D lenses in Bianca’s glasses. Then I carefully edged the safety lenses so they were beveled all around and would snap tightly into place in Bianca’s frames. To a casual observer Bianca’s glasses now looked as if they had prescription lenses in them. All I had to do was to get her to wear them.
I had been correct in my thinking. Bianca had not rebelled against wearing the glasses. She had rebelled against not being able to see through the lenses without forcing her eyes. She gradually reached a point where she didn’t mind wearing her diopterless glasses all the time, and now after 3 months had gone by, she was wearing them from morning to night. Alecia thought they were her prescription glasses, and I wasn’t going to tell her any different. By now Alecia was ready to give birth again, and I prayed for a boy so that I wouldn’t have to go through the same subterfuge with another girl. My only other option was moving from Tumbledown, and with my parents and Alecia’s parents all still living in town, that was not really an option I wanted to suggest. Living anywhere else would be so expensive that Alecia would also have to work, but with her extreme myopia it was not likely she would be able to get a job anywhere. Alecia was accepted and was actually someone special in Tumbledown due to her strong prescription. Anywhere else she would likely be ridiculed for wearing the strange looking thick glasses she so badly needed.
I felt that I had dodged a bullet when Kyle was born. Bianca was now 18 months old, and she would not really need to see Dr. Belson for another year and a half. By then I hoped that when the good doctor found that Bianca had not yet developed any myopia, he would just leave her wearing the same -3D glasses. Actually, I probably would have to buy Bianca a new frame and lenses because I was afraid of taking the lenses I had created out of the old frame so I could try to put the original lenses back in. I would be smarter to tell them Bianca had broken her glasses and then buy a new, close to identical frame with new lenses.
Soon after Kyle was born, I had to take Alecia in for her annual eye examination and retinal check. My mom stayed with Bianca and Kyle while I did this, and I never worried about our mother’s discovering that Bianca was wearing nonprescription lenses because both our mom’s wore prescriptions in the low -20D range and if they tried her glasses on, they could see almost nothing anyway. Bianca had totally accepted wearing glasses, because mommy and gran and nana all wore glasses, so Bianca was just like them.
When you have a prescription of -5D a jump of -5D is horrendous. But when you already wear -45D glasses and have a 40mm long eye, if your eyeball length increases by 1mm to 41mm and your prescription jumps to -50D it is not such a big deal. Alecia’s glasses were going to be the same double myodiscs she had worn for the past few years since her prescription had gone above -30D. But her new -50D double myodisc lenses now had a 20mm rear bowl and a 25mm front bowl. Her eyes looked like pin pricks through the stronger lenses in her new glasses, and I really liked her appearance wearing them. She was proud of her increase, even though she had not jumped any higher on the town’s most myopic list. I am not so sure that she saw as well as she had when we first married, but her eyesight was still fairly good for having such a strong prescription. Her old glasses were placed in the recycle pool, but they were too strong for any of the other ladies. There was a rather attractive 18 year old girl who had just gotten her new -35D glasses so there was a chance that Alecia’s old glasses might actually receive some use, and there was also a chance for Alecia to be overtaken by her in the next few years.
You might have surmised that I was thinking that somehow or another the town eye doctor had been increasing the myopia in the female residents of our town for years. You would be correct, but Dr Belson had only been in town for about 3 years. Of all the other eye doctors that had been in town that I remembered my mom taking my sister and I to see I could not remember any of them being here for more that around 5 years. And as I think back on it, I can’t remember any of the other eye doctor’s wives that wore glasses as strong as any of the ladies here in town. The more I thought about this the more my mind began to think that these doctors came here to study high myopia and how it could be created. My wife and the other two ladies that were even more myopic than her were brought in frequently to have retinal exams. Most of the younger girls that were around the same aga as my daughter Bianca were getting their second pair of glasses by now. Bianca had recently received a reminder that it was a year since she had gotten her glasses and it was suggested that she should have another appointment. But I convinced Alecia that we could wait for a while longer because Bianca had no problem seeing things. She agreed, and I was saved for another year.
Bianca was 18 months old when Kyle was born. Alecia and I had waited for about 5 years after we married before we had Bianca, and now Alecia was 27. She wanted to have another child, so we tried a little harder to get her pregnant, and that worked all too well. My prayers for yet another boy was not answered this time, and there was going to be another girl to worry about. By now Kyle was 18 months old and Bianca was 3 years old so there was no way I could avoid having Bianca’s vision tested.
When I made the appointment for Bianca, I told the receptionist that Bianca had broken her glasses. Fortunately, I went with Bianca to the eye appointment, and I had told Bianca to tell the doctor that her glasses had broken if he asked her. Dr Belson spent a lot of time testing her with different lenses and when he finished, he told me that he was going to give Bianca the same prescription she had in her other glasses. He seemed to have a puzzled look on his face, and that indicated to me that he couldn’t figure out why he had not been able to increase her prescription as he normally did. But I was just as happy. The books I had read indicated that with her grandmother’s and her mother all being highly myopic, there was very little chance that Bianca would escape being nearsighted, but with children the later they develop their myopia the less their chance is of becoming extremely myopic.
Two more years passed by. Another new eye doctor came to town, and he must have called all the extreme myopes in so he could examine their eyes. Maria, the attractive young lady that had worn -35D glasses for the past 2 years now needed a prescription of -40D at the age of 20. Alecia had been 23 when she got her -45D glasses, so it was likely that Maria would be giving Alecia a bit of a race for the third most nearsighted lady in town. But somehow or another the new doctor had given Betsy Smither’s a new prescription of -65D and he prescribed Betsy’s old -58D glasses as being the perfect prescription for Alecia’s eyes. Martha Dunweiler had not needed an increase and she was actually going to have to have her cataracts removed so her prescription would be reduced by quite a lot. That would place Alecia in the number 2 position, but I wasn’t sure if Martha would fall back behind Maria, or if Maria would then be number 3. However, Maria did get to be number 3 as after her cataract removal Martha was now only at half her former prescription and was able to wear Maria’s old -35D glasses. I was a little surprised when I took Lianne in at the age of 13 months for her first vision exam, and our new eye doctor told me that at the moment Lianne did not appear to require glasses but because of her mom’s history of extreme myopia it would be prudent for me to keep an eye on Lianne and bring her in if she appeared to be bringing reading material or other work close to her face, or if she wanted to draw very near to the television screen when she was watching cartoons. This was a little bit of a surprise to me, as I had fully expected Lianne to be prescribed the same -3D glasses that Bianca had refused to wear.
My big worry was Bianca. She was 5 now, and she was due another eye exam. I didn’t know if I could convince the doctor that Bianca had broken another pair of glasses again, but I decided to have a talk with Bianca and tell her what I was thinking. I wanted her to wear her -3D glasses that day and to tell the doctor that she could see better without the glasses. To my surprise Bianca agreed to do this, and she was a real trooper that day. At the end of the exam the doctor talked to me and told me that for some reason Bianca’s eyesight had stayed the same and that she didn’t seem to need stronger glasses yet. Bianca still wanted to wear glasses, because her mom and her 2 grandmothers, as well as all of her friends at kindergarten wore glasses so the doctor suggested that we should get Bianca a new pair of glasses with the same prescription as she had been wearing. I could hardly contain my pleasure with this turn of events. I had seen what wearing minus glasses from an early age could do to children that might have had perfect eyesight, and while my daughter might not fit in with the rest of the kids in Tumbledown at least if she became nearsighted it would be solely because it was genetic, not induced.
I had discovered how to order glasses online, so when Bianca and I got home I went to the online site and Bianca helped me choose a new frame for her new 0.00D safety glasses. They were not quite as inexpensive as a pair of low prescription minus glasses would have been, but they were exactly what I wanted for her and when they arrived there was just enough lens thickness to them that they looked like they were prescription. By now the other girls that were in Bianca’s kindergarten classroom all wore glasses that appeared to range in power from around -4.50D up to what looked to be as high as -7.00D. I was pleased that my little subterfuge appeared to be working, but I suspected that Dr Olsen would not be around for long if he was not increasing the children’s myopic prescriptions. I thought that Alecia would be unhappy that Bianca had not needed an increase in her prescription, and for Lianne not to need glasses yet was unheard of in Tumbledown, but surprisingly enough Alecia was quite satisfied that both our girls had better vision than she had at their ages.
Alecia had missed her period when Lianne was a little over two, and now that she was almost 3 Alecia gave birth to Jordan. That was going to be the end of us having children though.
Lianne had her next vision exam at the age of 3 and her eyesight was still good enough that she did not need glasses. And now when I was walking around town, I began to see other toddlers that were not wearing glasses out with their mothers. I started to wonder what was going on. None of the other eye doctors that we had would have missed an opportunity to let any of the kids escape the myopic progression that their mothers had gone through.
The following year Bianca had her biannual vision exam. To my surprise Dr. Olsen told me that Bianca not only didn’t need a new prescription, but that her eyes had improved enough that she no longer needed to wear glasses. This was really unheard of in Tumbledown. No 7-year-old girl had gotten a reprieve from wearing glasses. Bianca knew that her glasses didn’t have prescription lenses in them, and I decided I would leave it up to her as to whether she wanted to continue wearing the nonprescription safety glasses. She told me that glasses were a pain, because they got rain drops on them, and the fogged up and they got dirty, so she had to clean them all the time. I told her that she didn’t have to wear them anymore then and she seemed happy about that. Her sister and her 2 brothers didn’t wear glasses, so she decided that she wouldn’t wear hers anymore.
Alecia was as shocked as I had been. But for some reason she seemed pleased that her daughters had escaped having the extreme myopia that she had. I thought she would be unhappy, because if her girls didn’t need glasses, she might have a little less stature around town, but she told me that she was honestly pleased that the girls had good vision. She also told me that she hated not being able to see very well, and that she envied the girls their good eyesight.
I didn’t expect that either of the girls would get through high school without needing glasses. I did make sure that they both got lots of time outside in the fresh air, and that I taught them both to take lots of breaks from whatever they were reading and to focus on distant objects instead of burying their noses in the pages of books. All 4 kids enjoyed the outdoors a lot. Bianca was the first to get her drivers license, and then Kyle got his. Lianne easily passed the vision exam when it was her turn, and a couple of years later I took Jordan in to get his beginners. I was very surprised when Jordon could not read the 20/40 line, so I made an immediate appointment with Dr. Olsen, who had now been in town longer than I remembered most of the other eye doctors had been. Jordon required a prescription of -1.25D and then was easily able to pass the eye exam. Now all 4 kids were driving, but it sure was a surprise to see Jordan wearing glasses. And it was a little bit of a surprise that Jordan was given such a low prescription but was told to only wear them when he felt he needed them. What a change in outlook under Dr. Olsen’s tenure! Don’t get me wrong. There were still quite a few girls in school that needed pretty strong minus prescriptions. However, now a high school graduate who needed -20D glasses was almost an exception rather than the rule. I was dying to find out how it was possible that the town fathers came to their senses. Something strange had happened, because now the forbidden books were available to the public and had been for a few years now.
Betsy Smithers had passed away sooner than expected and it was discovered that she had an undiagnosed heart problem. She had just recently begun wearing Martha Dunweiler’s old -70D glasses, but even though Alecia had only recently started to wear Betsy’s old -65D glasses Alecia was now the most nearsighted lady in town. Maria had been nipping at her heels though and had been waiting for the -58D glasses that Alecia had been wearing. Maria had married George Lock, and her prescription increased significantly when she had the twin girls, both of which seemed to need glasses by the age of 1. I had noticed that Alecia no longer had very good visual acuity and the best she could do for reading the eye chart in Dr. Olsen’s office was the 20/70 line.
I managed to get a few minutes alone with Dr. Olsen. I asked him what, if anything, could be done to improve Alecia’s corrected vision and he told me what I suspected I would hear. Although he did tell me that it was possible that if Alecia wanted to wear Martha Dunweiler’s old -70D glasses she might be able to see a little better with a bit of overcorrection, but he was hesitant to give them to Alecia because it had been proven that prescribing stronger glasses would cause a person’s prescription to increase. That was my opening.
“And that theory was proven right here in Tumbledown wasn’t it Doctor.” I said.
“Yes, yes it was, but that was before I came.” Dr. Olsen relied sheepishly.
“I suspected that when I found that my daughter Bianca did not want to wear the -3D glasses that she had been prescribed by Dr. Belsen.” I answered.
Our conversation went on for longer than I had anticipated, and I had to take Alecia home so Dr. Olsen suggested that we should meet after his office hours had ended that afternoon. I came back just before 5, and it was about half an hour later before he was finished for the day. He asked me how much I knew about myopia and its progression, so I told him. He expressed surprise that I was so well informed and asked how it was that I knew so much. I explained that as a maintenance worker for the town I had done a lot of work on the stacks at the library and had discovered a lot of books on myopia had been hidden away in a section that required town council’s permission to see them.
I think Dr. Olsen was a little hesitant that if he told me too much, I might cause a problem for him. He said that he liked his job here in Tumbledown and didn’t want to be sued, nor did he want to move anywhere else so he was relieved when I told him that our conversation would never go any further. That is how the whole story came out. In the 1930’s myopia was an unknown quantity and there had been no real research on how myopia was caused – or created. A number of new eye doctors – and I say new because until the College of Optometry at the University of Pennsylvania awarded the first Doctor of Optometry degree in 1923, there had been no specialists in Optometry – were very curious about the origins of myopia. There was no doubt that there were plenty of people who were myopic. Women, who mainly worked in the house at that time, were not expected nor needed to have good eyesight so a lot of ladies went around with up to 5 diopters of uncorrected vision before they wore glasses. Certainly, there were people, both males and females that suffered from much higher degrees of myopia that could not function without spectacles, but no one had done any research. Dr. William H Bates had published a book called “Perfect Sight Without Glasses” in 1912 and it was re released in 1920 with a new name. Now it was named “Better Eyesight Without Glasses” due to the furor that the term ‘Perfect Eyesight” had been subjected to from the few oculists that professed to practice optometry, “Better Eyesight” was a safer legal choice. The book was still ridiculed, and Dr. Bates was called a quack for his suggested treatment of poor eyesight.
A number of eye doctors had wanted to discover if myopia was passed down from your parents. They were mostly located on the east coast, so quite a few of them raised enough financing to create a new, small town that was within driving distance of the majority of the doctors that invested in the town. Patients of these doctors that were myopic were then given very attractive deals on new homes to move there. But the main stipulation was that the house could not be sold. It had to remain in the family for at least 75 years. The second world war put a hold on their plans, and it was 1945 before the town began to take shape. The first residents, all couples, were a mixture. A certain number of nearsighted males were chosen. Then there were a number of nearsighted females that were picked to live there. And then there were a number of couples in which both the husband and the wife were myopic. The focus was to discover if myopia came from the parents and if so, what percentage came from each group.
This community had been in existence for about 10 years. By this time the west was really opening up, and the original investors in the town were just nicely starting to get some results. They were preliminary of course, but it looked as if the father was myopic then daughters would also be myopic but sons only had a 50% chance of being myopic. If both parents were nearsighted the chance was better than 75% that at least 3 out of 4 children would be myopic. If the mother was myopic, it was a real crap shoot. All of the kids could be myopic, or maybe none might be, especially if the father was farsighted. The research was sadly lacking, and the doctors wanted more information, so a committee was formed, and the result was that they decided to create a town out west. Tumbledown had been a mining town until the silver ran out and was now deserted and for sale cheap. But Tumbledown was within driving distance of a town that had an industrial base. The doctors bought the town and built houses. The plan for Tumbledown was to see if myopia could be created, and they didn’t care if it was in ladies or men. But they soon realized that with the men working they needed to be careful as it was a little harder for a highly myopic male to get a decent industrial job. They then decided to concentrate on the ladies.
Martha Drumweiler had been 80 when she died about 15 years earlier. Her cataracts had been removed when she was around 70, so she had to have been a fairly nearsighted young bride of 25 when she came to Tumbledown in 1960. I knew her husband slightly because he had been a friend of my fathers, and I knew that the Drumweiler’s had been one of the early arrivals in town. Their daughter Lucy had been one of the first kids born in the new Tumbledown Hospital. Lucy was quite nearsighted, as were all of the girls her age, but her prescription didn’t even come close to that of her mom. But, as Dr. Olsen explained to me, every girl was prescribed a pair of -3.00D glasses as soon as they were a year old. Every year the children had vision exams, and those children that were now myopic were given new, stronger glasses. Some children took a couple of years before they had reached the -3D prescription in their glasses, but generally as soon as their real prescription reached -2.50D the strength of their glasses was increased. This was done with every girl that was living in town. And all of the ladies had their prescriptions increased as soon as they were within -0.50D of the prescription they wore. But as Dr. Olsen told me, they did not want to create a lot of very nearsighted ladies who could no longer function on their own. They just wanted to see if myopia could be created from a very early age, and if so, how much more myopia could be created. The induced increases in a lady’s myopia were stopped once they reached around -20D and any further increases were due to increases that were likely helped along by the fact that wearing very strong glasses for the correction of myopia leads to myopia getting worse anyway.
I asked Dr. Olsen about my wife’s severe myopia, and he told me that some girls, like Maria Lock and my wife just seemed to become more and more myopic every year. He did tell me that very few children were able to avoid becoming myopic and that he was surprised that Bianca, our oldest daughter, had managed to reduce her prescription to nothing. That is when I decided to tell him how Bianca had refused to wear the prescribed -3.00D glasses and that I had replaced the lenses with plano safety lenses. With that he laughed and then he told me that Bianca, by not becoming myopic, had provided one of the reasons for the people who still funded the town to shut the project down. They had learned what they set out to learn and there was no use continuing as many young ladies were now having lens implants to allow them to avoid wearing glasses. And now, there were so many women in the work force that there was no way they would all sit back and allow only the fathers to support the family like my mom and my wife had. Now Tumbledown would loose the secret funding, but the original doctors had provided a means to maintain a reduced rate of funding until the tax base could be increased to where the citizens could help the town survive. Apparently, the original town back east had now had the houses transferred to the descendants of the original owners and they could so whatever they wished with them, so that experiment had also ended.
I was not displeased that Alecia was highly myopic, but I sure was happy that I had made sure that Bianca and our other children had avoided the problems of high myopia. Even Jordon looked as if he would only need a very mild prescription as long as he was careful with his studies and reading.
Specs4ever July 2020.
https://vision-and-spex.com/the-myopia-experiment-t2408.html