When I was nine years old my father took me to my first New York Mets game at Shea Stadium and I was thrilled to watch my favorite baseball team play live. However, upon taking our seats way up in the stands during the first inning, I realized that there would be a major problem for the remainder of the game. As I looked hundreds of feet down to the field, everything was blurry- I couldn’t see David Wright’s number on his jersey; I couldn’t see the numbers on the scoreboard; I couldn’t even see where the ball was being thrown. This angered me because I could read the scorecard in front of my face just fine, but everything went from clear to blurry as the distance from myself increased.

Consequently, I took a trip to visit my eye doctor the following day. I informed Dr. Rubin of the difficulty I was faced with during the previous day’s activities and he asked me to sit in a chair so he can perform some tests. One specific evaluation that I remember was when Dr. Rubin placed a series of random letters in front of me that decreased in size with each progressive row. “Read aloud all the letters in row four,” he said. In response I called out, “E, H, F, B …” and so on. Next came row five and the same process was repeated. Finally when Dr. Rubin asked me to announce the letters in row six, it became obvious that my vision was blurry- I’m not sure if I was correct on even half of the letters that I shouted. At the end of my visit, Dr. Rubin said, “Okay Dylan, that’s all. It turns out that you have 20/30 vision and will need to wear glasses when looking at things far away because you’re near-sighted.” I had no clue what most of this meant at age nine, but I knew that I had dreaded the idea of having to use glasses in class, in the movies, and in any other public place.

What I didn’t realize at the time, was that those glasses that Dr. Rubin prescribed were very important for me to function properly. Apparently, I had vision that was considerably worse than the average person; the fact that my vision was 20/30 meant that I had to be at 20 feet to read the same letters that someone with normal vision could read at 30 feet. The test of decreasing letter sizes that Dr. Rubin used to determine this visual acuity, or the smallest spatial detail that I could resolve, happened to be the same that all eye doctors used. Additionally, the fact that I was considered “near-sighted” meant that I had myopia. To understand myopia, one must first know how light rays are focused in the eye.

First off, every person has a lens system that is responsible for refracting, or bending, light from many different angles onto the same point of the retina- the layer of neurons in the back of the eye. Although this system creates a bright image for a person to perceive things better, it can sometimes make that image appear out of focus. The cause of this problem is called accommodation, which is when the lens changes its original shape and thus alters its refractive power. The improper refracting from this accommodation in my particular lens system resulted in myopia. Since my eyeball was too long, the point of focus for that bending light fell in front of my retina, rather than on it. This is why Wright’s number appeared burry, while the scorecard appeared clear at the baseball game when I was nine years old. It’s a shame that the light that entered my eye couldn’t have been bended appropriately onto my retina, with no refractive error. Unfortunately, I was not lucky enough to have such emmetropia, as experts call it, and instead was stuck with myopia and those horrible glasses.

Despite my initial embarrassment about wearing glasses, in time I came to truly appreciate those helpful lenses because I was finally able to see things properly. Those negative lenses were able to diverge rays of light before they entered my eye and thus corrected my myopia issues. As a result, I was able to happily watch my favorite team play the next time I attended Shea Stadium for a Mets game and didn’t have to worry about anything being too blurry to see.