As a child for some reason I had always wanted glasses; I thought they were cool and wanted my own pair. But at the same time I thought I would have 20/20 vision forever as it seemed that only my brother’s and my dad had bad enough eyesights that warranted them needing glasses. I thought that I had inherited my mother’s eyesight and that since I was a girl I would not end up needing glasses as it seemed that needing glasses ran only on the male side of my family. But I was wrong.
When I was in the 8th grade I began noticing problems with my vision, but I didn’t pay too much attention to it as it was not really affecting me. But by the end of that year it became a very big problem! I could not see a thing any of my teachers wrote on the board or put on the overhead clearly even when I sat in the front row of the class. I was no more that 5 feet away from the board and even while squinting I still could not make out what was written very well. Turns out I had inherited my dad’s bad eyesight instead and was in serious need of glasses.
So that summer I ended up getting glasses. I was like a whole new world once everything was in focus and crystal clear. I found out that my not being able to see objects clearly far away, but being able to see objects up close clearly was called nearsightedness. But that was as far as I knew about the issue. I figured that since my eyesight started getting blurry around the time that I started to play handheld video games that was the cause; but as I learned in this class correlation does NOT equal causation.
Turns out that my problem of nearsightedness came from my love for books which I had inherited from my mom. What happens with nearsightedness is that the eye is a little longer that the normal shape it should be, so by the time the image passes through the lens (the part of the eye involved with this issue) and reaches the retina the that image is out of focus. So by getting glasses my problem was fixed as adding a lens on top of the lens of the eye allowed for the image to be pushed back a bit so when it did pass through my lens and reach my retina everything would be in focus.
So though my love for books is the cause for my needing glasses, I’m not too upset. I’m still able to read and I got my wish of being able to wear glasses (I guess I jinxed myself as a child). If it wasn’t for this class I would not have found out the cause of my eye problem and would not have gained a deeper appreciation for the eye and vision.
I can personally relate to the common eye disorder, nearsightedness. I was diagnosed with nearsightedness in seventh grade, at the age of twelve. Being nearsighted means that images focus in front of my retina, as oppose to focusing behind my retina which is farsightedness. Unlike the author of this post, my diagnosis is partially due to the fact that nearsightedness runs in my family (my mother, father, and sister are nearsighted), and partially due to my cornea naturally changing shape. I realized in school that I was constantly squinting in order to see the blackboard or objects that were far away from me. This disability impacted my learning and since nearsightedness runs in my family, I thought the best thing to do was to get checked by an optometrists. Like many of the other student blog posts I read, I have never been opposed to wearing eyeglasses. My sister had to got a pair and I always thought that eyeglasses were a sophisticated accessory. I am lucky that wearing glasses is an easy way to compensate for this eye disorder. Glasses push light further back in my eyes in order to help me see objects that are far away more clearly. With time, my prescription is slowly getting stronger and stronger, which might result in me switching to contact lenses.