I stood in the hospital room that was full of family, all gathered around the bed where my wife lay in bed holding “no name”, our newest family member. Katherine was my name choice, as we had known she was going to be a girl for the last 6 months. My whole family used nicknames. My dad Peter was called Peck. Don’t ask me why, and where the heck does Peck come from Pete? My sister Sammie was really Samantha. My name is Duncan, and I am called either Slam or Dunk, or Slamdunk which is a combination of both. I suppose that is natural because I stand 6’3” and was the tallest player on my high school basketball team. My mom’s name was Anna Katherine, and she was called Annie Kat all her life. I figured if we called the baby Katherine we would be honoring mom and the worst nickname we could come up with would likely be Kat or Katie or even KitKat. My wife, who was holding the center of attention was Alicia, nicknamed of course Allie and I wanted Alicia to be Katie’s middle name. But I hadn’t won the argument yet. And yes, I think I do know where Peck likely comes from – Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. At least Allie’s side of the family wasn’t into stupid nicknames. Her father Frank was called just that, and her older brother Robert was Bob. Her mom was Judy, and there isn’t much you can do with Judy as a nickname. But even with the baby in Allie’s arms that meant there were 9 people in the hospital room and that made it a tight fit. It was time for people to leave, but I couldn’t rush them out. Sammie was wearing her glasses, so I was pretty sure that meant she had ridden with my parents as she needed to wear her contacts to drive. I liked to see Sam in glasses because I really liked the thick myodiscs she needed to see past the end of her nose. Sam was 3 years older than me and had worn glasses for as long as I could remember. And I suppose that Sam wearing glasses had set the stage for me. I loved girls in glasses and when I dated, I always chose a girl that wore glasses. Allie had a much lower prescription than Sam needed, but she did wear glasses that were in the range of -7D and I had hopes that when she had her eyes checked after the baby was a couple of months old we would find she needed stronger glasses. Allie had been complaining for a while that her glasses seemed to be too weak and her doctor had told her that sometimes ladies needed to get glasses after having a child, or if they already wore glasses, they needed stronger glasses. I had hopes that Allie would eventually end up in the range of -10D because I liked the looks of glasses in that range. I loved the way the light bounced off the flat fronts. But Allie was now 22, and unless having a child increased her myopia, she was likely at the end of her myopic progression. Allie and I had been married for 2 years now. She was 20, I was 22, and we had dated in high school. Allie had graduated a couple of years after me and she took an accounting course so she could go to work for her dad. Frank owned a successful bookkeeping business and he needed help in his business, so who better than a family member? I had graduated from high school, gone on to take an operating engineers’ course, and was presently occupied during the day with running a track hoe – called an excavator in some parts of the country. I enjoyed my job, and I made pretty decent money. We had bought an older home and I worked on it during the evenings over the past couple of years so now it was in much better shape than it was when we bought it. Samantha, my older sister, was a bit of a conundrum. She was unmarried, didn’t have a boyfriend and worked as a cashier at the nearby grocery store. She was extremely nearsighted, and her eyesight just seemed to keep getting worse and worse. I can’t remember Sammie ever not wearing glasses and my earliest memories of her were her coloring at the kitchen table with her face just inches from her work. All through the school years her idea of a good weekend was to lay on her bed in her room reading a book. By the time she was 13 her glasses were already pretty thick and by the time she was 18 and went to work at the grocery store full time the only reason her glasses would even fold closed was because the earpieces were hinged well back from the face of them. By the age of 20 the part of the lens that held her prescription didn’t even reach the outer edges of the face of her glasses, so it looked like her lenses were almost like little circles. Once she turned 23 the lenses of her glasses had to have actual circles in them. That was when she got her first pair of contact lenses because she cried to everyone that would listen that no boy would ever ask her out wearing such awful looking glasses. But even after getting her contacts her life did not change. She still read 3 or 4 books almost every weekend. And now, instead of wearing her glasses, she was doing her reading as close to her books as ever but now through her strong contact lenses. No boy was ever going to ask her out while she laid at home in her room reading book after book. I had a theory about Sammie and her poor eyesight. I felt that it was highly likely that Sam had caused much, if not all, of her myopic progression. I had done a bit of research on myopia when I was in school and excessive near point work without taking lots of breaks was noted as one of the reasons for the development of myopia in school children. And once a person becomes myopic, their myopia tended to increase at a much higher rate if the child continues doing a lot of near point work. The wearing of contact lenses gave better vision for high myopes, but they could also increase the myopia faster than by wearing glasses because a wearer of glasses could reduce the effect of the prescription in the glasses by lowering the glasses on their nose. This increases the focal point distance, which in effect lowers the degree of correction in the lenses. Don’t get me wrong. I loved my sister, and I really liked her glasses, but sometimes the “poor me terrible eyesight, no boyfriend” rhetoric got a little hard to take. What did she expect – that her prince charming would come into the grocery store, sweep her off her feet and take her away to a life of leisure in his castle? She had to get off her duff and get out into the world to meet people. Anyway, enough about my sister for now. I had my own wife and daughter to worry about now. Allie’s bleeding had stopped, and she and the baby were allowed out of the hospital at noon the following day. We had the nursery ready and everything was great. And once Allie had the baby in her arms, she did decide that Katherine Alicia would be a great name for her. Allie breast fed Katie for almost 6 months before her milk dried up. Once the breast feeding was over, I took Allie to her eye doctor and she got her new glasses and that gave me a pleasant surprise. Her new glasses needed to be -8.25D and I thought possibly if the next pregnancy gave her a similar increase it would put her pretty close to the -10D I was hoping for her to reach. Actually though. we chose a high index lens for her new glasses and they had flat fronts to the lenses so I was happy enough that it wouldn’t matter if she never had another increase. Katie was a year and a half before Allie got pregnant again. It was the middle of tax season and Allie came home one day complaining that her eyesight had gotten a lot worse. Off we went to her eye doctor and Allie ended up with a stronger prescription for -9.25D. She got her new glasses and they looked wonderful but a couple of weeks later, after missing her second period Allie did a home pregnancy test and it was confirmed she was going to have a second child. I thought we might have been a little premature in getting her new, expensive, glasses but she looked so gorgeous wearing them I didn’t say a word. We named our son Gordon after Allie’s dad’s middle name. He was a great baby and wasn’t quite as colicky as Katie had been. Allie’s milk lasted until Gord was 9 months old so we didn’t get Allie back to her eye doctor until Gord was almost a year old. Allie was now over the -10D I had hoped for and her new prescription was actually -10.50D. I shelled out almost $500.00 for this new pair of glasses and they looked every bit as good as her old ones did. But we had decided that 2 kids were enough, so Allie now wanted contact lenses. I couldn’t say much and all I could tell her was that I liked her better wearing glasses – as if that could stop a woman from getting what she wanted. Gord was a couple of years old and Katie was 4 years and 3 months when I noticed that Katie was doing a lot of coloring and printing. She was going to a playschool group 3 days a week and she could now read and knew her letters and numbers and colors and could talk a blue streak. She could even read Gord stories, although she didn’t always read all of the words. But the main thing I noticed was that Katie seemed to bring things closer to her face than I thought she should. Katie had an eye exam before she started first grade and at that time, she did not need glasses. I was a little surprised that she didn’t, but I was not unhappy about this. She still seemed to bring everything a little too close to her face for my liking, but I never said a word. By the time she was 11, and in grade 6 she had become a little bit nearsighted and she got her first pair of glasses with a prescription of -1.25. A year later this prescription had doubled, and her second pair was -2.50D. When she was 13, and in grade 8 her prescription increased another -1D and Kate campaigned with her mother to overcome my objections and Kate got contacts. Jake Duggan moved back to town from the city, where he had gone after graduation. Jake and Sammie had been friends in school, and although I could not remember them ever dating, once Jake was back in town, he and Sam seemed to be going out together a lot. Jake had a daughter, Constance, who was a few months older than Kate, and was in the same grade at school. Connie’s mom had died from some form of cancer and after her death they had returned to town so that Jake’s mom could help look after Connie while Jake went off to work. Connie really would have been old enough to look after herself, but I guess Jake felt better if his mom was around in case Connie needed someone and he wasn’t there for her immediately. Connie wore glasses that sort of reminded me of the ones Sam wore when she was Connie’s age. There looked to be quite a bit of correction in her lenses and although I wasn’t really good at guessing prescriptions, I figured Connie’s glasses were somewhere around -14D or so. But what was interesting was that Connie and Kate became fairly good friends, and after Kate had her next prescription increase to-5D she stopped wearing her contact lenses. I suppose this was because Connie didn’t wear, nor did she seem to want to wear contacts. And at 14 Connie looked really attractive wearing her glasses. She had long blond hair that she wore in a ponytail a lot of the time, but once in a while she parted it in the middle and let it hang, framing her angelic face. Her glasses seemed to have a fairly small lens opening size but one day when she was at our house, she took them off at my request and let me have a really good look at them. I was a bit surprised because the lens opening was noted as being 49/18, and that was wider than I thought it would be. They were a black wire frame with an expanded metal in the middle of the area at the hinge side, which was set well back to allow the earpieces to close no matter how thick the lenses were. The earpieces looked to be an extended triangle area filled with the same black expanded metal that ran back to the plastic pieces that went around the ears. I tried them on, and the temple length was way too short for my head. The inside of the frame was painted white and I think they were one of the nicest frames I had ever seen, either on, or off the wearers face. The lenses were thick, but the thickness was not visible through the black expanded metal. I asked Connie if she knew her prescription and she told me that it was somewhere around -13.50 for the first number in both eyes. I didn’t know what was going on until I found this out a few years later. Apparently, Katie liked the thickness of Connie’s glasses so much that she was now wearing her -3.50D contacts under her -5.00D glasses so that she could get much thicker lenses in her next pair of glasses. And, when Katie and Connie went to my mom’s after school they had found Sammie’s stash of old glasses that mom was going to take to donate and had told her they would be happy to take them and put them in the bin at the eye doctor’s office. Sammie’s old glasses never made it to the donation bin. Except for a couple of pairs of Sammie’s first glasses they were all too strong for Katie to wear, but Connie was able to wear some of the weaker ones. It didn’t take any more than about 6 months before the increased power that Katie was wearing made a noticeable increase in her prescription. Katie’s next increase brought her up to -7.50D. Again, unknown to anyone but Connie, Katie still continued wearing her -3.50D contacts under her new -7.50D glasses. Katie’s eye doctor didn’t seem to be worried about the fact that Katie, at age 14 had just needed a -2.50D increase, so it didn’t raise any red flags for Allie and me. Sammie had apparently stopped wearing her contacts soon after she started living with Jake. Now Jake did all the driving, so Sam didn’t need her contacts. And now she announced that she and Jake were getting married. I was happy for Sam. She was now 39 and, while I didn’t know if they planned to have any children, Sam was approaching her best before date when it came to having a child. I knew that Sam was very good with both Katie and Connie, so it was possible that she would want a child of her own. It seems that once Katie reached her -7.50D prescription, unknown to either Allie or me Katie was wearing an old pair of Connie’s glasses when she wasn’t wearing the -3.50D contact lenses under her own glasses. And Connie was wearing an old pair of Sam’s glasses most of the time. The girls were very careful to not get caught by Sam or myself and Allie. But they were able to wear the stronger glasses to school, and likely a lot more of the time than we realized, as they were together a lot. Katie’s next eye exam showed that she had another big jump in her myopia, and this was only 6 months or so after her previous -2.50D jump. This time her prescription had gone up a full -3.00D and now I was a little worried. Her new prescription was just as strong as her mother’s was, and while I liked looking at my daughter and watching the light dance across the flat fronts of her lenses I knew that her having such a strong prescription at the age of 16 did not bode well for the future. But Connie, who was a few months older than Katie, had gotten new glasses as well and Connie was now wearing glasses with a prescription of -16.50D. Neither Katie, nor Connie felt that there was any problem with their having to wear the strong glasses that they now required to see anything past the ends of their noses. Sammie and Jake’s daughter Callie was almost 2 years old now, and Sam was being a wonderful mom. But she spent so much time with Callie that she really didn’t notice that Connie, who had gotten myodisc lenses in her newest pair of glasses, was now wearing a pair of her own old glasses most of the time. Her old frame looked a lot like Connie’s new frame, and once myodiscs come into the equation no one can really determine the power of the glasses just by looking at them. Katie had started to wear Connie’s old -13.50D glasses when she was at school. When she was around home at night, as well as on the weekends, she was wearing her old contact lenses under her glasses so it was no surprise to her when she had her eyes checked around 6 months after she was prescribed her -10.50D glasses and our eye doctor discovered that her prescription had increased by another -2.00D. I probably would have been more worried about this except that Sam had very similar prescription increases when she was Katie’s age. I really didn’t know what prescription was in the old glasses of Sam’s that Connie was wearing these days. I did learn after the fact that around this time Katie started wearing Connie’s -16.50D myodiscs whenever she possibly could. She had to be very careful not to get caught by Allie or myself and I know that when she was not wearing Connie’s myodiscs she again wore her old contact lenses under her -12.50D glasses. It took well over a year before Katie needed to have her eyes examined again. She had forced her eyes to adapt to Connie’s -16.50D prescription and then she had worn a stronger pair of Sam’s old myodiscs for a month or two. This time when Katie had her eyes checked her prescription had reached -17.50D. She wanted myodisc lenses in her new glasses, and that is what she got as it was the best choice for her prescription now. Connie went back for a vision exam around this time and her prescription was right at -22.00D. Connie had been the role model in this, and when Connie got her new -22.00D myodiscs she decided that she was not going to wear any more of Sammie’s old myodiscs. Katie could have, if she felt like it, worn another pair or two of Sammie’s myodiscs, but Katie also decided that she no longer wanted to have stronger glasses than she was now wearing. As she told me one day when we were talking about her myopic progression, once you wear myodiscs there is no real sense in forcing your eyes to need stronger glasses. That is when I realized that both Connie and Katie had been inducing more and more myopia, but there was no doubt that with both Sammie and Connie as role models Katie had just gone along for the fun of it. Specs4ever Jan 2019