Making Spectacles of Themselves

I hate wearing glasses. I hate eye glasses, yet I love them in the same breath. Well, the right ones.

Mine broke the other day on my run. I bent down to tie my shoe, and must have bent these Izod flex frames just a bit too far and I heard a definite *snap* in my pocket. I figured the ear pieces had just snapped over the nose pads or something. But to my dismay when I got home, the bridge had broken. I literally had a *pair* of glasses now.

All my life, until about 10 years ago, I had perfect vision. No, better than perfect. I had 20/10 vision for most of my life. About 20 years ago, I had regressed to 20/15. For want of a better explanation, it means I could see at 20 feet what everyone else had to go to 10 or 15 feet to see. . .yeah, I know I was a spoiled BRAT.

I remember realizing what a blessing my vision was when my poor sister got her first pair of glasses. She was around 5th grade. She'd had chicken pox and her vision went haywire. No one knew for years, but somehow they figured it out and when she got her glasses, she exclaimed,

"OH WOW! You can see little trees on the mountains! And the leaves on the trees!"

There in the car, driving home from the eye doctor, I felt so terribly sorry for her that I cried. She had gone all this time without seeing all those things I just took for granted.

I first realized that I needed glasses when I went to work at a store, about 10 years ago. Really, they should have just changed the ink on the price tags. That is all I was having trouble with. It was really faint. But I went to the optometrist and got my first pair of prescription glasses. Basically they were readers. My close-up vision was deteriorating. I had to get the 150 strength readers. I got tired of peering over the top and feeling like a granny, so after a while I decided to graduate to bifocals.

I think that was a big mistake. They over corrected my far vision. It drove me nuts. I kept taking them back in and telling them to leave the far vision completely uncorrected. Nada, nothing. just plain.

Over the course of the 10 years, somewhere in there, I must have forgotten to tell them to keep the far vision uncorrected. I remember once after I had gotten a new pair, I told the clerk that they made me feel dizzy when I walked. The impatient clerk told me to just keep them on and wear them, I would get used to them. I was intimidated into obedience, and eventually my eyes adjusted to the corrected vision.

Now I cannot see the faces of the people across a room without my glasses. grrrr.
I have become so dependent on them, that I take them everywhere. That is why I took them running, albeit in my pocket, so I could read my Ipod.

I think I can adjust and make my eyes work to see better. I remember getting lazy and just staring into space, and letting it just blur. The reason I believe this is while I was waiting for them to be fixed, my eyes adjusted a bit to the old ones, and when I got my fixed pair back, they felt weird.

So when they broke, I was really crippled. I got out my old glasses, and my vision has clearly gotten worse. (No pun intended.) While I waited for them to be fixed, I found myself holding the objects farther away to see with those original readers.

Last year, about this time, I lost my glasses. I could NOT find them anywhere. I went for a couple of weeks without them, hoping I would find them, using my old readers and contact lenses. I was also hoping to just make my eyes adjust back to the readers, but when I looked in the mirror and noticed frown wrinkles forming because I had been squinting, I gave up and went back in. The optometrist wouldn't just replace them. It had been more than 2 years, so I had to get another vision check. About 7 months later I found the old pair, and I couldn't even see out of them. I was seeing out of them just fine when I lost them. What had happened in two weeks to change my vision so drastically? I would have expected it to be almost the same prescription. Does that make sense?

So when Sailor thought he was needing to get glasses, I encouraged him to just get readers from the drug store and try to go as long as he could without going to the optometrist. He actually has gone about 5 years or more and is still without glasses. He got some readers for the close-up stuff.

This might sound paranoid, but I believe the optometrists go to conventions and learn how to keep their customers dependent on them by strengthening their prescriptions just a tiny bit each time. Does anyone else think that there is a conspiracy to make us dependent on or am I just silly?

Anyway, my glasses are back from the repair place. They replaced them. I'm glad to have them back. I wish I could get a lens transplant so I could have my perfect vision back. They say the lens is what becomes inflexible as you age and makes it harder to focus. That's all I need is a lens transplant. Glasses are a pain. Can't do with them, can't do without them. I guess I had better be grateful for this modern age when I can have something like this so I can see.

QUIT COMPLAINING ANNIE! Count your blessings!

~a