When I was about 9 years old, my older sisters and I decided to attend a special screening of the original Toy Story movie. Unfortunately, this momentous event matched with spending an absolutely necessary amount of time mulling over the perfect choice of candy lead to a packed movie theater. This being the case, my sisters and I were forced to situate ourselves in the only available seats consecutive seats of three, which just so happened to be in the last row! This was a bit of an upset for me but I decided to let it go and enjoy the movie, which was about to begin. Unfortunately, upon taking our seats all the way in the back of the theater, I noticed that the preview that was wrapping up seemed fuzzy to me. Thinking it was just the quality of the movie trailer, I tried my best to brush it off – that was until the movie itself began. It was at this moment it dawned on me that there was going to be a major issue with my viewing of this special feature. I couldn’t discern Buzz Lightyear’s space cadet uniform from those worn by the Squeeze Toy Aliens, which you can assume, crushed me. Thinking that perhaps my eyes were just a little tired, I looked down at my sweets to see if the effect carried over but (to my surprise) I could read the tiniest words on the box perfectly clear.
As any logical 9 year old would do, I opted to sit in the aisle towards the front of the theater for the remainder of the flick. When it was over I told my mother about the difficulties I seemed to experience with my eyes and she, of course, made an appointment with my eye doctor within the next week. After a series of tests, which included having to read aloud the letter of the alphabet my eye doctor pointed to from this chart on the wall (referred to as the Snellen chart), I was diagnosed with the optic condition known as myopia. The condition (myopia) is better known as being nearsighted in everyday terminology. With vision at 20/40, according to my eye doctor, I had to begin wearing glasses in doing common activities because my eyes were not capable of observing things that were further off. Although I hadn’t the slightest idea what my eye doctor was talking about with all these numbers and medical terminology, unlike most other kids my age, I thought the idea of using glasses was the coolest thing since sliced bread.
What I didn’t discover until much later in my life was that those numbers and words my eye doctor used when describing my eyesight meant that my vision was notably worse than that of the average person’s. At 20/40 vision, I had to be 20 feet away from a given object to clearly observe it while the average person could be as far as 40 feet away while maintaining the same clarity! An example of this is evident in the image provided below:
More specifically, the biological reasoning behind my condition of myopia was accredited to the length of my eye, which happened to be much too long to be able to see as far as I would have liked. In fact, my lens system was unable to properly accommodate the images that appeared on my retina because of my eye’s length and so my nearsightedness became a prevalent issue that had to be dealt with. My glasses corrected this issue by diverging the rays of light before they entered my eye so the accommodation process could be conducted in a progressive manner. The end result was that I could perceive the world in a much more clear fashion while wearing some killer, hot-pink frames! (Not the best life decision I made as a 9 year old, in my opinion).