Around 6 years ago, shortly after my wife died, I sold the house we had lived in for the past 20 years and moved into the city, where I could be close to my daughter and my grandkids. I ended up buying a small fourplex that was close, but not too close for me to be underfoot. The likelihood of my daughter or her hubby running into me in my neighborhood was minimal as the stores I would be shopping in might have been the same ones they would use, but they had the same chain supermarkets much closer to them. The main reason for me distancing myself was because I have a hobby. Before my wife died none of my other family have known about my hobby, and about 5 years before she died, I had finally convinced my wife that my wearing very strong glasses over plus contact lenses was because of a muscle problem with my eyes. I have always had a difference between my eyes of about -2.25D and I could see distance well with one eye and I could, even at 71, read with the other. I explained doing GOC in such a way to my wife as a way to help me with an eye muscle imbalance that was known as convergence insufficiency. Strengthening my eye muscles and forcing my eyes to work together was necessary because my eyes were creating problems. The distance eye and the reading eye would no longer work together, and it was becoming impossible for me to use both eyes together. After numerous visits to various eye doctors and the purchase of a few different pairs of glasses that I kept complaining didn’t work I advised her that one doctor had suggested something very unusual. Using very high powered plus contact lenses I could wear an extremely strong pair of minus glasses that allowed me to see both near and far. And surprisingly this worked well. I told her that I didn’t have to wear the combination all of the time, but it helped if I could wear it daily and for a minimum of 5 hours a day. Minus 40D glasses worked best as I could easily see near and far. Minus 30D worked also, but with -25D glasses I had to pull my glasses slightly away from the bridge of my nose to read. This allowed me to do GOC and I no longer had to worry about her coming home and catching me. Now that she was gone and I was far enough away from family that I didn’t worry anymore, I often went all day wearing various GOC combinations. I had one apartment rented to 2 nurses, another to a teacher at the local high school and I had just rented the vacant one to a young girl who was going to be attending a nearby university. I had no worries about being seen by any of them while I was wearing glasses, and I would often walk to the nearby grocery store. Most of the time I would wear my -30D glasses. I suspect they had about a -10D front base, and I think the rear was likely the other -20D. The only thing I didn’t like about these glasses was that they were a little short in the legs and I was always worried that they would fall off when I looked down, but I was pretty adept at pushing them up as soon as I felt them slip a little. The other pair I alternated with was a pair of -40D glasses, but they were myodiscs both front and back with the rear myodisc circle being around 28mm. The average person would not notice as the frames were similar and the myodisc circle, while smaller, was generally something no one would ever notice. The neat thing to me was that while I wore the correct contacts to give me good vision through the -30D glasses, if I were to put on the -40D glasses and drop them no more than about ½” (12mm) I could see very clearly through the -40D glasses. I likely would have worn the -40D glasses all of the time if it hadn’t been for the fact that if I wore the -40D ones for a couple of days in a row I would get headaches when I tried to go without them. For some reason wearing my -25D ones, or my -30D ones never gave me this problem. And I never once gave it a minute’s thought that anyone would notice the difference in my myodiscs and think that the strength of the glasses were different. I mean, you see a person with a pair of glasses that are myodiscs you can’t tell what the prescription is even with a rough guess. Once lenses reach myodisc territory they just become strong glasses – right? Well, apparently not to Cyndi Daniels. I was coming back from shopping one day just as she was going out somewhere and she looked me in the face and actually told me that my -40D glasses looked to be a lot stronger prescription. I stammered a little as I told her that they were the same as my other ones, and all she said was that they sure looked stronger. I was dying to know how she knew. For the next month I wore only the -30D glasses when I went out. And even on the days I spent at home if I wanted to do GOC I wore the -30D ones. From time to time, I would go out bare eyed, but that was all right because everybody knew I wore contact lenses some of the time. And that is when Cyndi found me out. I was bare eyed the day she brought me the rent check. She looked me directly in the face and she told me that I wasn’t wearing contacts, so she guessed I must do GOC. I was flabbergasted as I didn’t think anyone could tell. “How can you say that?” I asked. “You wear very strong minus glasses, yet you are not wearing any contacts without your glasses on. That is impossible if you were really very nearsighted.” Cyndi replied. “What do you plan to do about it if you are correct?” I asked. “Nothing, but I have been wanting to do GOC for a while. Can you help me?” Cyndi asked. This was not a threat to me, and I told her I would be happy to help her. I asked her why she wanted to do GOC, and she told me that she loved the looks of thicker minus glasses. She had read some stuff on the internet that talked about GOC, and she thought it would be a great way to be able to wear strong glasses. I agreed with her and told her about one girl that I had known through an old internet site named eyescene which had been defunct for a few years now. This young lady had worn -25D glasses over contact lenses for a couple of years. Supposedly she did not need glasses before she started doing GOC. My chart told me that a person would need +19.50D to wear -25D glasses, but this young lady had only been able to get +17.50D lenses and claimed she could see well with the -25D glasses. After her 2 years of wearing the GOC combination all the time she started having trouble with her contacts and was unable to wear her -25D glasses. But now she could not see very well, and an eye exam revealed that she actually needed -3.50D. Most young people have a fair amount of accommodation and what this young lady had ended up doing was to cause herself to develop some myopia. I don’t remember what happened in the end, but I think she managed to get herself glasses that were in the -4.50D range and she had to forget about ever doing GOC again. I told Cyndi about this girl, and she then told me that she was already a bit nearsighted. Her contact lenses were -3.50D and so were her glasses but she said she could not see as well with her glasses as she could with her contacts. Up to and including a -5D prescription the contacts and the glasses were usually the same, but there likely is a small difference that would barely be noticeable. I was surprised when Cyndi told me that she wouldn’t mind wearing stronger glasses, and when I questioned her about that she told me she had to wear glasses anyway, so if they were a bit stronger people would be able to tell that she really needed them. In my collection I had a pair of ladies’ glasses that were -18D for both eyes. Cyndi really liked the appearance of them so I went to work figuring out what Cyndi would need for contacts. I thought her real prescription might be as high as -4.00D so taking that from the +14.75D the table indicated left her needing +10.75D contacts. I already knew that contacts were only available in 0.50D steps above a 10D prescription, but I hadn’t realized that if we wanted to use the exact same brand and size of contacts that Cyndi already wore, the maximum plus prescription they came in was +10D. She asked me if I thought she could manage with the difference, and I told her I also had a pair of -17D glasses if the -18’s were too strong. We went ahead and ordered the contacts. Both my pairs of glasses had a pd of 64mm, but Cyndi only needed a 63mm pd, however I didn’t think that would really matter as it would only be out a half a millimeter for each eye. The contacts took a week to arrive, and when Cyndi put them in and tried on the -18D glasses she was quite pleased, both with her appearance and her vision with the GOC. She had been preparing her friends at university for her appearance in glasses by telling them that she had a pair on order because her contacts were killing her and when I asked her how her friends had liked her glasses, she told me that no one seemed to bat an eye when she showed up wearing them. These -18D glasses were done in regular plastic although I thought maybe they were the 1.56 version instead of the normal 1.51 because they were not as thick as I thought they would be. Cyndi wore these glasses for the next 2 months and around the first week in December she went off one day with no glasses. I asked her about this, and she told me she was going home for Christmas and didn’t want to shock her parents too much by wearing her GOC combination. She did tell me that she could barely see any more with her old contacts so I figured the little weaker contacts that she wore with the -18D glasses might have affected her eyes slightly. When she came back from visiting her parent and her eye doctor I asked her about this and she told me that she now needed -5D contacts, but she wasn’t going to get new glasses because she would rather get stronger glasses to wear with her GOC combination. That is when I realized that Cyndi was likely going to try to increase her real prescription as much, and as fast as she could. I had to make a decision though. Should I help her as much as I could, or should I just leave her to her own resources? Cyndi took that decision away from me. When she returned from spending the Christmas holiday season with her parents, she proudly told me that she had spent some of her Christmas money on a new pair of glasses, and they would be arriving here any day now. I was going to caution her about wearing her contact lenses for all her waking hours and she surprised me by telling me that she had ordered a pair of glasses for her to wear around the house that were -2D stronger than her doctor had prescribed. That is exactly what I would have suggested doing. As we enjoyed a cup of coffee in my kitchen, I did manage to tell her about some of the problems of being very nearsighted. I explained that retina detachments often happened with very high myopes. I also explained that certain structural changes in the shape of the eyeball caused by the ciliary muscles being stretched too far could also bring about serious problems, but Cyndi simply said that she was willing to take her chances. She told me she had searched the internet to read about these problems and she felt that if she took the vitamins that had been shown to promote eye health, she should be fairly safe. I could see that it was going to be an exercise in futility to attempt to change Cyndi’s mind, so I simply asked her if she had decided how much myopia she eventually aspired to have. She answered that she had seriously considered this, and she thought that if she could attain a prescription of -20D she would be quite pleased. Cyndi was a few weeks away from her 18th birthday, and while she was a late starter, I told her that with her putting a bit of extra pressure on her eyes in order for the ciliary muscles to keep increasing her pseudo myopia, hopefully it would eventually become real myopia. I felt that she had a very good chance to meet her objectives. This was really the last time I gave Cyndi any advice. She finished first year and went on to second year. She had gone home for 2 weeks during the summer, and while I wondered what she had worn at home for glasses while she was there, she never volunteered that information. I was just happy enough that I was still able to go around my neighborhood wearing my -40D glasses most of the time. I had come to a compromise with myself and had told my daughter, her husband and my grandchildren about my convergence insufficiency problems and the requirement for me to wear really strong glasses over extremely high plus contact lenses so I was able to do this around my family. This allowed me to stop worrying about ever getting caught, and since I was now able to wear the -40D glasses every day I no longer had to put up with the headaches when I wanted to stop wearing them. What was really funny was that before she had passed away my wife had told my daughter about my vision problem, so I had been fretting for nothing. I really liked the appearance of Cyndi wearing her -20D glasses. She had worn them all throughout her second year at university, and now that she was into third year, she still wore the same glasses. I asked her one day what prescription contact lenses she was now using, and she told me that she was wearing +6D lenses. Her -20D glasses would require +16D contacts if she had perfect eyesight so I figured she must be somewhere around -10D. She still had a while to go before she would be able to get rid of her glasses. Cyndi had been working for the same company during the summers for the past 2 years, and this year was not going to be any different. She had returned the first pair of -18D glasses to me when she got her -20D glasses and I was a little surprised when she came to me just before she went to her summer job and asked me if she could borrow them again for a while. I had no problem with that, and I frequently saw Cyndi wearing these glasses instead of her -20D ones that summer. In the fall, after her visit home and her return to school Cyndi brought my -18D glasses back to me. She was wearing a new pair of glasses that looked to be at least -20D but it was hard to tell because they were likely done with every thinning trick in the book, along with having the expensive anti reflective coating and likely the blue blocking one as well. “I really like the looks of your new glasses Cyndi.” I said. “Thanks Sam. They were really expensive even though I bought them online.” Cyndi replied. “What prescription contacts are you wearing with them?” I asked. Cyndi removed her new glasses and let me look closely into her eyes. There were no contacts there. I knew then that the reason she had borrowed my old -18’s had been so she could go the summer without wearing her contacts, and that over the 4 month summer season she had adapted well enough to the -18D prescription that she felt comfortable enough to order her new, very expensive pair of -20D glasses. Now we would see if she could stop with -20D, but I suspected that she would. Cyndi and I both had a bad case of weird, and you can’t buy weird. Specs4ever August 2021