I met Melinda Saunders the first day of kindergarten and we have been best friends ever since. For the past 5 years we have played together after school, have had sleep overs at each other’s houses, have gone shopping for clothing together and have traded clothes with each other. We have read the same books, watched the same television shows, liked the same movies and have been just like sisters. Melinda hadn’t said a word to me, so that was why it was such a shock when she told me in school one morning that her mom had taken her to the eye doctor and she needed to wear glasses. Apparently Melinda was nearsighted and she couldn’t see things in the distance clearly. When Melinda got her new glasses I was a bit jealous. She looked really cute wearing them, and I told her so. Of course I had to try them on, and I found I could see really well when I was wearing them. But I could see just as well when I took them off, so I knew I probably didn’t need glasses. I wouldn’t have minded having to wear them, but I soon discovered that wearing glasses caused a bit more trouble for the wearer than not wearing them. They got dirty and you had to clean them. They made marks on your nose, and they sometimes hurt behind your ears. And it seemed that the more you wore them, the worse your eyes became, because now Melinda couldn’t see nearly as much as I could when she took them off. And if you were out in the rain the lenses got all spotty, so you had to wipe them a lot. But even with all those problems that Melinda had I found myself wanting to need to wear glasses. A couple of years later we were both 12 and were in grade 7. Melinda had to get new glasses last year when we were in grade 6, and they were a bit stronger than her old ones were, but it didn’t make any difference to her except that she could now see better again. However, I was starting to notice that I could no longer read what the teacher was writing on the board and I was almost at the point where I was going to tell my mom that I couldn’t see the board clearly. I hadn’t said anything to Melinda, but she had noticed and she told me that she thought that I should have my eyes tested. Apparently our teacher had also noticed me squinting, and she had called my mom, because one day when I got home from school mom told me that I was going to have my eyes examined that afternoon. It was an interesting experience being at the eye doctor’s office. They had a couple of different machines I had to look into, and then the nurse took me into an office and sat me in a big chair. I sat there for a few minutes, and then the doctor came in. He looked into my eyes with a light, and then he brought this great big machine over in front of my face and I had to press my forehead up against a pad at the top, and put my chin on a chin rest. Then the machine did a bunch of clicking sounds all by itself and the doctor asked me to read the letters on the wall. I tried but they were a little bit blurry still so I told him so. He made a few clicks and then the letters got really clear so I could read all the letters perfectly. Then he made the letters smaller and they got a bit fuzzy so I told him that and he clicked the machine again. The letters were now really clear and he told me that it looked like I was going to have to wear glasses. I sort of knew that and I told him that was why I was here. The doctor talked to my mom for a couple of minutes and then we went next door to the one hour optical place. A lady helped me and mom pick out a frame that I liked and then we had to wait for a while for my glasses to be made. When they were ready the lady put them on my face, and then she took them off and adjusted the legs behind my ears. She kept asking me if they hurt anywhere, and finally they didn’t so she left them on and mom and I went home. I was a little surprised at how clear everything looked because I hadn’t realized how blurry stuff had gotten. The next day when I went to school Melinda wanted to try my glasses on. She was surprised at how much better things looked to her with my glasses and she told me that my glasses seemed to be stronger than hers. And she was right, when we traded glasses I could not see nearly as well with her glasses on as I could with my own. I didn’t really understand why that was. Melinda had worn glasses now ever since we were 10 years old and were in grade 5 and she had gotten stronger glasses just last year. But my first pair of glasses were stronger than hers were now. I didn’t think a lot about that, because I was just happy that now I was wearing glasses. And now I actually experienced what Melinda had told me about when she first got her glasses. When I took my glasses off my eyesight seemed to be really bad and I hated to have them off even for a minute. It was a little less than a year later when I started to notice that everything had fuzzy edges. Nothing was really clear again so I figured I needed new glasses. I waited as long as I could before I told my mom and after I told her I was back having my eyes tested again one day after school. The doctor told mom and I that my eyes had gotten quite a bit worse, however that was a fairly normal occurrence for a girl of 13 and I could likely expect a few more changes over the next 3 or 4 years. What I didn’t think was fairly normal was for me to end up getting 4 more new pairs of glasses before I had my 14th birthday. By now my glasses had a prescription of -7.50D and my mom had to buy me a special type of thin lens because I had chosen a wire frame that had sort of a cates eye look and the lens was held in by a plastic line around the bottom. Melinda loved the looks of my new glasses, and she wanted to wear them, but I really needed them so I could only let her try them on once in a while. Then she wanted to wear my old glasses, as they were only 3 months old and were a bit stronger than her own now were. The frame was almost the same as her frame and the lenses were definitely stronger, but no one seemed to notice that they were any different from her own glasses. I am fairly sure that Melinda forced her eyes to get a little worse by wearing my old glasses. Her own glasses had been -4.50D and my old glasses were -6.00D. A few months after Melinda started wearing my old glasses she had her annual eye exam, and her prescription was now -6.00D for real. She got her mom to buy her the same frame I was wearing for my -7.50D glasses, and I knew the reason why she had done this. But I was stubborn. I did not want Melinda to talk me into letting her wear my old glasses. I sort of liked the fact that my eyes were a little worse than hers were. Hers looked to be just as thick as mine were, but that was because her mom had not bought the same thin lenses my mom had gotten me. I knew I needed new glasses right around the same time Melinda had gotten hers, but like I said, I was a little stubborn and I didn’t want to give Melinda my old glasses to wear. Finally I could no longer take the blur, and I ended up having my eyes examined again. My prescription had jumped quite a bit and my new lenses needed to be -9.50D. I told my mom that I didn’t want new frames, but just wanted to have new lenses put in my old ones. With the increase I had the optical store didn’t want to order me new lenses for that frame, but I told them I loved the frame and I didn’t care if my lenses looked thicker. The real reason was that I didn’t want to give Melinda my old glasses to wear, but I didn’t count on how persuasive Melinda could be. When the optical store called to tell me my new lenses were ready to be put into my existing frame I went there - wearing Melinda’s – 6.00D glasses into the store while she waited outside for me while wearing my current, but soon to be old -7.50D glasses. My eyes just kept getting worse and worse by themselves. I didn’t like the fact that I had to get stronger lenses every year or so. But Melinda wanted her eyes to get worse because she loved the appearance of the thicker lenses that I needed. I thought she was a little crazy for wanting stronger glasses because I would have done anything to stop my eyes from getting worse. But other than this quirk Melinda was my best friend, and I didn’t want to lose her. Now she had a problem though. She had to go for her annual eye exam wearing my old -7.50D glasses and she was afraid that her doctor would discover that she had been wearing a stronger prescription than he had given her. Finally Melinda came up with a solution. She would wear my old -6D glasses to her eye appointment and if anyone questioned her she would tell them she broke her glasses and these were her spare ones. While Melinda was figuring out how she was going to get around her little problem she was also doing more scheming to figure out how she could end up wearing my latest prescription. She had been questioning me as subtly as she could to see if I needed new glasses yet. I had seen right through her little tricks and had told her that my eyes seemed fine with these glasses right now. She surprised me with her next trick though, as she asked me if she could borrow my prescription and when I questioned her as to why she told me that she was going to take it to a one hour optical and buy a new pair of glasses using my prescription in a new frame that she liked. Then she would have her eyes tested and she would buy her new glasses in exactly the same frame. I told her they would catch her doing this because my newest prescription was almost a year old and they would not believe her that she had gone a whole year without getting new glasses. I had not counted on Melinda’s powers of persuasion and that is why I was sitting at a table in the food court of the mall reading a book, which was about the only thing I could see well enough to do while wearing my – or should I say – Melinda’s -7.50D glasses. She was at the one hour optical store, wearing my -9.50D glasses and ordering new glasses using my old glasses and my almost a year old prescription to convince them it was her prescription. The original plan had been that I was supposed to go with her to choose a new frame, but I couldn’t really function well wearing her old glasses so I chose to read for a while. Melinda eventually came back wearing her new plastic framed glasses with my -9.50D prescription. I took one look at the lens thickness and I told her that if I had to wear glasses as thick as they were I would be wearing contact lenses. She gave me my proper glasses back, thanked me, and told me that the lens thickness was exactly what she wanted to have. She wore them proudly around the mall, and only took them off when we got close to her house. Melinda went on to have her eyes examined. Of course her new prescription had reached the -7.50D that she had been wearing for the past year. She had chosen the exact same frame that she had bought a week earlier, and when her mom let her go to pick up her new glasses when they called to say they were ready Mel came home wearing the -9.50D glasses. Her parents never saw the pair with the -7.50D lenses that were done in her real prescription. Now that Melinda was wearing glasses that had the same prescription as mine were she was not going to be able to get glasses that were even stronger. My eyes were still worse than hers were. But to look at the two of us you would never have guessed that. Her glasses were so much thicker than mine that everyone thought that Melinda was the one with the worse eyes. Specs4ever August 2018