10 February 1999

I Can See Clearly Now ...

My parents noticed that the natural wandering focusing of their baby's eyes wasn't going away when I was about 18 months old. My left eye consistently traced a path inward towards my nose and stayed there, unmoving while my right eye did all of the focus-work. The doctors told my mother to wait a little bit longer to see if the eye would correct itself. By the time I was two, I was wearing my first pair of glasses: tiny, thick, plastic frames with real glass in them.

At that time, in the mid-to-late seventies, they didn't make my prescription in plastic yet.

Around the time I turned three, a new procedure was developed that could correct the lazy eye. The eye-doctor told my mother about it. My parents were considering the surgery when the doctor died. Then we moved to France and my new doctor did not recommend the surgery.

When I was three and change, the eye-doctor decided to try patch-therapy to strengthen the muscles in my left eye. The next few months were sheer torture. Every day when I got up, my mom would stick an adhesive patch over my eye. It itched all day and tore the fine hairs of my eyebrows and cheekbones out when it was removed. I had an almost perpetual reddened ring of skin around my eye from pulling those dratted things off.

We switched to a foam-padded adhesive that hurt less, but it still left that nasty sticky stuff in a ring around my eye and they were more prone to falling off. Finally, my mother decided that enough was enough. She got out the sewing machine and soft squares of felt. She made a number of patches in colors that matched my favorite shirts and tied on around my head. Now I could pretend to be a pirate when I had a patch on. The whole thing got a lot easier after that.

I don't remember exactly how long I had to wear the patches for, but it seemed like an eternity at the time. There was much rejoicing on the day when the doctor said I didn't have to do it anymore.

The next step was bifocals. I think I got my first pair when I was four or five years old. I wore them until I was eleven.

As I grew my eyes were slowly reshaping and the far-sightedness grew less and less every year. The load on my nose grew lighter as methods of producing plastic lenses improved and my prescription came into range.

However, by the time we moved back to the States in 1985, during the summer before my twelfth birthday, I was apparently too old to have the procedure that was proposed when I was three. I was stuck with glasses for the time being. They simply didn't make contacts for my problem yet.

Over the next few years, my glasses continued to thin and get lighter with each new pair. The changes in the prescription grew smaller and smaller until my growth reached a plateau when I was around sixteen. That's when I got my first pair of contacts.

Though I could see better with them and it felt great to get all the weight off the bridge of my nose, I never could manage the extensive cleaning process. Once again, then just didn't make disposables in my strength yet. I wore contacts frequently throughout high school, but once I left for college I only got them out for school portraits.

Now they sit, abandoned except for the occasional party or wedding in their case on the side of the sink. In the meantime, "feather-weight" technology has made glasses even thinner. My glasses are within the realm of reasonable in terms of size and weight. I now own a discreet pair of oval wire-rims with super-scratch-resistant, non-reflective lenses that fit in the frames.

I've also grown so used to the glasses that they've almost become a part of who I am ... an integral part of my face. Though deep inside there is still that seminal longing to be able to see unassisted.

And now this news. Laser surgery has made leaps and bounds since that original cut-and-stitch procedure was proposed to my parents twenty-some odd years ago.

I burst into tears when I read this piece today. The only thought that kept echoing through my mind was this: they can fix my eyes, at last, they can fix my eyes.

All of my life, I have wanted to see without glass in front of my eyes. I longed to be free of reflections and red marks on my nose. I suffered under the taunts of children on the play-ground: frog-face, four-eyes, brainy, dork. In my imagination, I did not have glasses, I was tall, athletic and graceful. In truth I was of average height, somewhat plump and a bit klutzy.

The news that they can now fix the types of problems that plagued my childhood and adolescence with the flicker of a laser beam, in about 60 seconds simply made me weep with pent-up frustration and remembered longing.

If only they'd had that when I was younger and my parents had a little bit of extra money.

It costs $2000 per eye to get it done. I am not sitting on a pile of $4000 extra dollars. To boot, at this point the damage to my ego and body-image are done and glasses are no longer the cause of discomfort that they once were. So what's the point, right?

There's also this little caveat: it's considered to be elective surgery by the insurance companies. As if poor eyesight wasn't a disability. As if wearing glasses weren't a social handicap. As if the cost of the surgery doesn't wind up saving money in the long run over continually re-purchasing glasses for a growing child. As if it weren't even a medical condition being treated, but some kind of cosmetic procedure like liposuction and tummy-tucks.

For shame. For crying shame.