When the first part of this story ended in part one Andrew and Monica had just gotten married after a whirlwind romance and Monica was working as Andrew’s receptionist at his Psychiatric practice.
Monica had not been completely happy with the first pair of glasses she had gotten after the operations to make her extremely myopic. They were myodiscs, but they had been made with the highest index lenses possible. I thought they looked great on her, but she wanted an even thicker looking pair. We went off shopping, armed with her newest prescription from the doctor that had done the laser surgery on her eyes with a plus 10D prescription and had also implanted +15D inner ocular lenses. I suppose that Monice really did need new glasses because it had now been about 6 months since she had the operations, and her eyes had settled in nicely to her now extremely myopic eyesight. Her prescription now was a little stronger than the first one she had been given, and she now required lenses of the power of -32.50 for both eyes, up slightly from the -31.50 that she originally had been given.
Monica had been given a choice when the doctor made her very shortsighted. Her doctor had suggested that she could have cataract surgery, which would have removed her inner lens and replaced it with a very strong plus lens which would have created just as much myopia as the lens implant and the laser surgery together did. The only problem with that operation is that she would have lost her ability to focus up close, as the cataract lens replacement would have been a fixed focus lens with only the ability to focus for distance. At the age of 27, she did not wish to do it this way, and now, even with the strong glasses she wore her eyesight was fairly good for both near and far. I don’t know if it was the fact that she had been doing a lot of reading and other near point work ever since she had gotten her original -31.50D prescription that caused her prescription to increase slightly or not. But the doctor seemed to think that it was just the fact that her eyes were simply taking a while to adapt to the changes. Also, I know that Monica had told the doctor that her night vision was fairly poor, so it is possible that he might have given her a little stronger prescription because of that.
When we left the doctor’s office that day Monica was wearing a pair of -1.00D contact lenses that the doctor had given her to wear under her old glasses from his free samples to let her see what things looked like with her new prescription. She thought this was wonderful. Much to my surprise Monica had also ordered a pair of contact lenses in her full prescription to wear on occasions where she didn’t want to wear glasses. Allowing for a 12mm vertex distance the doctor had ordered Monica a pair of -23.50D extended wear lenses that were supposed to be extremely comfortable and had quite a high water content. I was a little shocked by her ordering the contact lenses because I knew how happy Monica was now that she was able to wear her strong glasses all the time, but I knew better than to say anything. She had something up her sleeve that would soon make me realize that she had a good reason for her to purchase contact lenses to wear.
We visited 3 optical stores before we came to one that Monica found an optician she could deal with. All 3 stores had been known to the BIID community as having opticians that were willing to go along with whatever the customer really wanted, but it wasn’t until we got to the third store that Monica felt she had made a connection. The optician here was a little older and had been around for a few years so when Monica explained to him that she wanted the thickest possible lens blank that she could get he didn’t blink an eye. He went to a room at the back of the store and brought out a single finished double myodisc lens blank and although it was in a slightly lower prescription than she needed, Monica took one look at it and said that was exactly what she wanted. The front of the lens was done on a flat base carrier but there was a myodisc circle in it that was fairly large and was still obviously a myodisc. A full myodisc circle on each side was the only thing Monice really wanted, and the front circle had to be around 30 mm, which was the biggest circle the lens could take and still give the full myodisc effect. The rear of the lens was done with a much smaller circle – maybe about 25mm. There was a slight plus curve on the rear – nothing too steep, but maybe a +3D or so. The lens itself was just under an inch thick at the outer edges, and even if they were to grind it to the size needed to fit into a smaller frame the edge thickness would actually get thicker because the sizing of the lens would cut into part of the slightly plus rear carrier.
Once the lens selection was made we then had to choose a frame that could take this thick lens. Of course the larger frame sizes that were now popular were of no use, but finally Monica and the optician found a frame that she liked. I was a little worried because it was a wire frame, and the lens was held in around the bottom with that fish line stuff. But the hinges were set well back and the lens could be mounted in such a way that the lens didn’t have to be brought forward a lot so the temples would still close. Monica was pleased with her selection. I wanted her to get a fancier pair of glasses for her to wear when we socialized and finally she agreed. We chose a little larger frame size in a plastic, and we had her myodisc lenses done in a very high index glass with the myodisc circle being blended into the carrier.
When Monica and I picked up her new glasses she was quite thrilled with the excessively thick pair, but she had to agree that the blended myodiscs were a much nicer looking pair of glasses to wear for a woman as beautiful as she was. And she surprised me by also wearing her contact lenses from time to time. Now I was to find out what her reasoning had been behind her getting contacts.
To a person afflicted with BIID there is a part of them that requires having people look at them with pity. They want to stand out in a crowd with their handicap and have people look at them and think “My, what a shame that woman is crippled and has to use a wheelchair” or something to that degree. People will often look away from someone who obviously has a handicap, and will not bring the handicap up in conversation. But the person suffering from BIID really wants, and needs, that conversation and will do almost anything they can to bring up the subject of their handicap. As I was with Monica pretty much all of the time now I saw these clues, but it took me a while to catch on.
We would come in out of the rain, and as so often happens she would have a few drops of water on the lenses of her glasses. I would always offer to clean them for her and I started to notice that when we were alone she said nothing more than a “thanks honey”. But one time we came in from the rain on our way to an appointment and as we entered the crowded elevator I asked her for her glasses so I could clean them. This time she told me that she hated to take them off because she was so terribly blind without them. And then she asked me a couple of times if I was finished yet. Then when she put them back on she took them off and gave them back to me, telling me there was a little smudge on the right lens. By the time we got to the tenth floor everyone on the elevator had taken a good look at her and her strong and thick glasses.
I was almost ready to tell her that if she didn’t like the way I cleaned her glasses she could do it herself, but part of me suddenly realized that she had done this for the attention. The next time I saw this occur was one evening when we were with a group of friends at a dinner and dance at the golf club. To my surprise she had worn her contact lenses along with a red low cut dress that she looked absolutely fabulous wearing and I am sure that she made most men drool when they looked at her substantial breasts. Without her glasses she was such an extremely attractive woman that sometimes I wondered how it was possible that this BIID thing had gotten such a strong grip on her. The hall was full, and we were having a great time dancing to the band. At 11pm the music stopped and it was time for a sit down luncheon. We had mixed things up a little between our group and some of the others so now our table of 8 only had one other couple that we knew from other dances and 2 couples that we had just met that evening. Monica announced loudly enough that the others could not miss hearing that her contacts were bothering her and she asked me if I had her glasses in my jacket pocket. Of course I didn’t. She had never asked me to bring them. That is when she told me that her spare glasses were in the glove box of the car and she asked me if I would run out and get them.
Sure enough, her really thick glasses were right where she said they were. She had never left them there before, so I knew something was up. When I got back to the table with her glasses she excused herself and went to the washroom. She came back to the table, a stunningly beautiful woman wearing her obviously strong and very thick glasses. Of course the conversation then came around to her poor eyesight and her strong glasses and I could tell that once we got home we were going to have a wonderful time making love. That is when I realized that her strong and unusual glasses were something that she loved to talk about with other people, and that there was definitely a sexual component to her wearing glasses.
After that I made sure I helped her play her game anytime that we were out in public. Whenever we were at the food court in the mall I would make sure I would say in a voice loud enough so that people could hear something like “I know you can’t read the menu board from here honey. Would you like me to read out the choices to you?” Of course she would tell me that it would be wonderful if I would do that, and she would then make some sort of comment on how terrible it was to have such lousy eyesight. Sometimes people would look around at her, but it was very seldom that anyone would ever say anything to her. But the glances they gave her were enough.
I was often surprised when Monica would wear her contact lenses to work, She would continue to wear them for the full day and then on into the evening when we were at home. She only did this once in a while, and I suspected that she did this so that she could rest her nose, because both of her pairs of glasses were rather heavy. The extremely thick plastic lensed double myodiscs that she had originally gotten for her -32.50D prescription had the little pads that rested on her nose, and after a few days of wearing that pair the marks from the pads were deeply embedded into the sides of her nose. One day of wearing contact lenses was not nearly enough to allow the indents from the pads to disappear, and anyone looking at Monica wearing contacts who had never seen her before could tell instantly from the indents that she usually wore glasses. Her other glasses had plastic frames with a little larger eye size, but the high index glass lenses had a blended myodisc circle, and the front of the lens was completely flat. I liked the appearance of her wearing these glasses a little better than I liked to looks of her wearing the extremely thick double myodisc plastic lensed glasses but Monica felt that they looked too much like an ordinary pair of glasses and did not draw enough attention towards her. Because of the glass lenses these glasses were also quite heavy, and while they did not have the nose pads like the glasses with the metal and fishing line frames did they caused quite a deep indentation where they rested on her nose. I think that Monica really liked the fact that the indents from both pairs of glasses never disappeared after only one day of wearing contact lenses so it was always obvious to people that she wore glasses
The day that Monica walked into my office and appeared in my life was the best thing that could possibly have ever happened to me. I had been trying to develop a clientele of BIID sufferers but until Monica came to me as a client I really did not know as much about the people who had this affliction as I thought I did. Monica was the one who made me see that BIID was a deeply seated emotion that likely existed since childhood, and no amount of psychiatric help could ever really remove the desires. Yes, with Monica’s help and knowledge I was able to occasionally convince a lady who wanted to be totally blind that being extremely myopic and unable to see anything but a blur past the end of her nose was almost as good as being blind. And if circumstances in their life changed, they could still obtain a pair of glasses that they could see with – maybe glasses would not give them really good vision, but at least that would have enough vision that they could function on their own much easier than if they were totally blind. I had approved a number of people for a BKA – that’s below the knee amputation, and I had one young lady that I approved for an AEA of her right arm – that is an above the elbow amputation. I did manage to talk most of these people into accepting a little less of a disability from what they thought they wanted, which in one girl who ended up having an AKA (above the knee amputation) was complete paralysis of the lower extremities, to something that gave them a handicap, but was a little less of a handicap than they originally had their hearts set on.
Another thing that surprised me was that a lot of these people who wanted to have limbs removed also had a desire to be highly myopic. Those who originally wanted to be completely blind generally came around to accepting being a high myope and then not wearing any prescription glasses most of the time once they had seen Monica wearing her almost 1” thick lenses in her plastic lensed myodiscs. Sometimes they would change their mind about blindness and go for glasses like Monica wore, but occasionally there were some who would just have the high minus operation and then wear dark glasses to go around as a blind person. And there was no doubt that they were blind because they really could not see their nose in front of their face. Once in a while I could convince a client who wanted to be in a wheelchair for the rest of their life that having a partial amputation as well as having their eyes operated on so they became very myopic would give them very close to the same thrill, and they would also have a legitimate excuse for using a wheelchair.
You might say that I was pampering them, and giving in to their desires by giving them what they wanted. But I knew that nothing short of being disabled would allow them to find satisfaction with their life. I think I should ask Monica if she will carry on with this story, because she can explain the inner feelings of a BIID sufferer much better than I can.
Specs4ever Oct 2015
https://vision-and-spex.com/the-pull-of-biid-part-2-andrew-s-story-continued-t711.html