My name is Mariana and this is the story of my glasses. It’s not so easy to write this, as thinking about my eyesight over the last 20 years can sometimes feel like a record of decline, even a kind of failure. But I can’t really think about it that way now. After all, I’ve been married to a wonderful man for nearly two years, and we’ve just had our first child – a beautiful baby boy. That, and my strong Christian faith, give me a very positive outlook on life, and at the moment my eyes seem to have settled too – I haven’t had a big prescription change for nearly two years, even after my baby was born. Every day, I thank God for what I can see and for the people I love.
But my glasses biography is a long one and my vision is quite poor. My parents first noticed that I was having trouble seeing things when I was about three years old, and I was prescribed glasses for myopia (near-sightedness) when I was four. I think it must have been my mother who chose the frames, but I liked them: they were simple round frames, with gold rims and I kept that same style for quite a long time – until I went to university. During childhood, my prescription changed a little each year, getting gradually stronger. At first I didn’t really notice – when I was 10, I suppose I was probably about -6.00, though I’m not sure as I don’t have any of my glasses prescriptions from that time. A photo of me at a wedding when I was 12 years old shows me quite a thin girl, in a dress I always liked, and in glasses that look to be a little stronger.
It was really during my teen years that my myopia progressed quickly. As my body started to change and grow in various ways, so my eyesight seemed to do the same thing. My mother joked that every time my jeans size changed I seemed to get thicker glasses as well. At the time, that felt like a hurtful thing to say to a hyper-sensitive teen, but now I think it’s quite funny, and it was certainly true. Like other girls with glasses in my class, I asked about getting contact lenses, but after a few disastrous attempts, it was obvious even to me that I wasn’t going to be able to tolerate contacts (though I really persevered), and anyway my eye doctor at the time prescribed me bifocal lenses to try and slow the progression of my myopia (bifocals are not great for teenage self-esteem, let me tell you). I kept to my style of round gold frames, and had new a new prescription at least once a year at that time, and they had very thick edges by the time I was 14. I’ve still got the prescription from an eye test I had on my 16th birthday: -14.00 (R) and -16.00 (L) with +3.00 for the reading part. In other words, I was now a severely myopic girl and I worried about this a lot – usually for typical teenage reasons, like not being able to get a boyfriend. The lenses of my glasses were not only thick, but were also slightly dished at the front as well as the back, making for weird reflections and sometimes comments from friends (and less welcome comments from people I didn’t like at school). I also worried about putting on too much weight, but my mother told me it was normal and a few friends said the same thing. I’ve got Latina heritage, and we tend to be quite curvy, which is what I was getting to be as I finished school. Despite my glasses, a few boys seemed to like me enough to ask me to parties and to dance with them – I’m a pretty good dancer and I suppose I have quite a nice figure if you don’t mind thick legs!
I went to university when I was 18 and during the summer break before starting, I got new glasses: a complete change of style for me, because I went for black plastic frames that were oval shaped, and a new prescription, -18.00 and -20.00. My eye doctor suggested switching to lenses that were not bifocals, and as you can imagine, I was happy to go along with that. When I went to collect my new glasses, I was shocked by two things. First of all, they were much thinner at the edges which was I thought was great, but they also looked weird, as the lenses had discs in them that I could see through, and an opaque section at the edges. From some angles they looked really cute, and they were much lighter on my nose, but from straight on, looking in the mirror, I was quite self-conscious about the strangeness of the lenses with the little discs. My eye doctor told me they were quite normal for someone with my prescription, and I got used to them quite quickly. After all, they were very comfortable, and I could see reasonably well out of them. I was incredibly happy to find at university two other girls with similar prescriptions to mine – so I no longer felt like a freak, which I sometimes had at school.
I had a couple of small increases during my student years, and I kept the same style of frames, and the same type of lenses. But even with full correction, my vision started to give me problems. The eye doctor told me that at least some of these were caused by little scars on my retina. I have no idea how they got there, but she told me they were quite common in people with high myopia. The result is that I found it increasingly difficult to read fine print, and over the last few years I’ve needed larger fonts on my computer to be able to read text. Friends laugh when they see me trying to read my phone because I have to hold it so close to my face, but hey, at least I can read it (I’m so happy that somebody showed me how to enlarge the font size on an iPhone – otherwise I’d really be struggling). I also have a pocket magnifier, but using that really does make me feel like the ‘weird girl’, so I only use it in private for studying, or when nobody’s around.
It was after I graduated that I went to my eye doctor to discuss ways of making my glasses look more attractive. She was very honest telling me that there’s only so much you can do to make a prescription of -20.50 and -22.50 look thin and pretty. One option was to keep with the lenses with discs, but a friend of mine who is also very nearsighted (one of the girls I met at uni) had a different type of glasses made of a special ultra-thin material, and my eye doctor recommended that I might like to try those instead. I picked out a great set of frames (blackish-purple plastic) and when I went to get fitted with them I was pleased with how they looked: of course they still looked very strong, and there were a lot more rings than there had been with the disc lenses, but I quite liked them – they made me feel cute for some reason – and several people complimented me, which made me feel really good. The downside with these lenses is that they are quite dished at the fronts (my disc lenses had completely flat fronts), so people see odd reflections when I turn my head (I made a video of myself to see how they looked – that was really the only bad thing about them except they do look very strong). They are also thicker at the edges than the lenses with little discs, but I don’t mind that so much (I don’t have much choice after all). While I was a student I definitely started to come to terms with a lot of things about myself, and I felt a lot more comfortable and confident with how I looked than I had done a few years earlier.
As a student, I’d nearly always worn jeans and t-shirts except for special occasions, but when I went shopping with a girl friend after graduation, she help me pick out some clothes that would look good for work: black pants, colored tops, that kind of thing. I felt quite pretty in these clothes and with my new glasses, and I was really thrilled when I got a position working in a library. This was my kind of dream job as I’ve always surrounded myself with books and been a very keen reader. For a few years I’ve tried to get large print books but they are expensive, though if I hold a book in normal print close enough I can usually read okay, so long as the type isn’t really small, especially if I’m on my own and can use my magnifier. In a library we have quite a big selection of large-print books. One co-worker said (she didn’t mean to cause offence) that ‘a lot of old people read these.’ I told her that some young people do too, including me. She felt bad about that remark at the time, but there was no bad feeling and we’ve become quite good friends.
I was at the library one day when a young man came in who I have known slightly from church for a few years. We got talking, then we went for a drink after work, and then we started dating seriously. One thing led to another and we eventually got engaged and then married. On one of our early dates, he asked quite a lot of questions about my glasses, wanted to know how much I could see and all that sort of thing. And he asked me why I didn’t get contacts. So I explained, and told him some of the story I’ve written here. I also told him that while I was anxious about my vision deteriorating even more, it seemed to be stabilizing now, so at least my glasses weren’t going to get too much thicker over the next few years – so he didn’t need to worry. He said something really nice: he was worried about my vision problems, and hoped I’d let him help with anything that was hard to see – but that he thought I looked extremely cute in my glasses. (He also thought I looked extremely cute in my tightest pair of black pants, and in clingy tops – he’s a guy, after all – and he kept saying all the right things).
When we got married, I wore my glasses at the Mass, and at the reception, and everybody said we made a lovely couple. One of my husband’s aunts tried to get me to take off my glasses for some of the formal photos – she was quite unpleasant and snappy about it (‘you look like a blind girl – take them off’), but we just told her it was our day, not hers, and that we were both cool about wearing glasses – and that I had no choice about it since I actually would be a blind girl if I took them off.
While I was pregnant, I visited my eye doctor and she tested my vision. It was almost the same as it had been, but she warned me that there might be a change when the baby was born (young mothers with bad vision can suddenly develop more myopia during or after a pregnancy). I was lucky: my current prescription is not very different from what it was three years ago: I now wear -21.50 and -23.00 in the special high index lenses, and I have a pair of prescription sunglasses with disc-type lenses in them (and a very dark tint, so I don’t think anyone can see the little discs). My computer at work amuses my co-workers as I have it set to a very large font that I can read comfortably. I do the same at home, and my lovely husband just whispers things about how he finds me sexy – which is all I could wish for really, since he’s also the kindest person I know. Now I worry that my little boy – and any other kids we might have – could inherit similar vision problems to me, but my husband says that all we need to do is have them checked by a specialist very regularly, and that if they do have bad vision, they’ll be ‘perfect like me’. That made me smile and cry at the same time. I feel very blessed, and it’s strange, but my glasses are one of the things that have always got me noticed, sometimes in a really good way. So, except that I wish I had better eyesight with my glasses (especially for reading), life is happy, and I feel blessed. I’ve certainly been very lucky in so many ways.
Thank you for reading this! It's the first time I've tried to tell the story of my eyesight so I've probably put in far too many details you don't want to read
Statistics: Posted by mariana — Thu Jul 07, 2016 5:52 pm