Visions of Clarity

     At the time of this writing, I can see well, and I'm danged happy about it. Getting to this point has been a bit of a saga, although to be fair, I've been here before.
What am I on about? Glasses! They suck, am I right? Not so much because you need to put them on the front of your face in order to keep seeing the world around you, but because they're such an amazing example of the horrific power of capitalism over health.
     My insurance does not cover glasses. Well, to be fair, because I have an expanded package thanks to needing a lot of physiotherapy periodically, they do pay for almost 1/6 of what I just spent on being able to continue to partake of the world in a visually acceptable manner. It's unusual enough that I could have spent money on this at all, but we're in a weird period right now: my severance pay was deposited into my bank account. I don't get to keep it: its existence means that the government will suspend our rental allowance until such a time as the severance pay has been exhausted in compensation. However, this does mean that I was able to "lend" myself the funds. I have a very small presence on Patreon, where I am sadly lax in being worth it, and it's always possible someone will buy a photo again sometime; with these shall I pay myself back (or rather, pay myself and my family back, given that all the money we have is for all of us to live on) for a period of several months. After that, I hope to save up for an easel so that I can go back to my non-photographic artistic endeavors (including a gift for a friend which is a long time coming): I must not return to my hunched-over ways now that I have my shiny new titanium intervertebral disc. Following acquisition of said easel, I need to try to get my hands on a couple of secondhand bicycles for my daughter and myself, to get us back into practice and condition and get her to college more easily, and then I can set my mind to saving up to replace my little waterproof camera which unfortunately is suffering from an unwell motherboard.

     Anyway, glasses! Never needed them. Never had a problem with the ol' peepers. That is, until I was 36. I found myself getting headaches and eyestrain a lot, and it dawned on me all of a sudden that it was possible that my eyes, just like my skin and my knees, weren't all that young anymore, and might benefit from an interface device. Thus it was that I found myself at an optician's office peering at pictures of sailboats and letter charts, discovering that yes, for everything closer than the other side of the street I did need eyewear. So I got my first pair of glasses. 
     Over the years, that pair began to suffer. Covered in incidental scratches, held together with rubber bands and paperclips, they clearly needed to be retired. I'm hoping that between the point of typing this and sorting out getting the blog post up, I'll be able to find that pair; it turned up recently in a box of things from my drawer at work sent to me by an ex-colleague. Ah yes, here they are.

     At this point I was working at the desk job which eventually (thanks a to a pretty long story culminating in a narcissistic bully of a bundle of insecurities absolutely laying waste to everything I had spent 10 years building) destroyed my mental health and contributed significantly to my physical disabilities, and because a lot of my work involved a computer screen but a lot of my work involved dealing with the public, stocking shelves, opening and closing the building, and in other words a lot of variable looking around, it was found that varifocals would be my best option. Here's a couple pictures.

     Eventually, after a great number of years, those too were in pretty terrible shape. Like the previous pair, the lenses were scratched up, the hinges twisted and wobbly, and it'd been a couple of years since one of those little sits-on-your-nose deelibobs fell off, so I normally had a streak of green copper oxide along one side of my nose. At this time, a dear friend offered that if I could get a prescription, she would buy me glasses through a service that she uses in the United States, which offered online try-on. Delighted and grateful, I thought this would be a piece of cake: every time I'd gone before to get new glasses, all of the opticians offered free eye tests and prescriptions. It turned out, however, that since I'd last been, the eye test and prescription had been mutated to being free only with purchase. I could shell out 20 bucks for one or I was S.O.L.
     Thinking I was being clever, I contacted the ophthalmology department at the hospital, explained the situation, and asked whether they provided basic eye exams and prescriptions. The receptionist said yes, no problem at all, and set me up with an appointment. When I got there, the doctor was incensed that I was wasting her time with this because it's "free" at any optician's. I explained though, and then, although she was still angry, it wasn't with me anymore. She was annoyed at the receptionist, but far more so at the opticians (all five chains I had tried). You see, it turns out that if you ask for it, opticians here are obligated to give you a machine eye test; it's only the more detailed personal exam that they're allowed to insist upon charging for. Not one had mentioned this. She herself, she said, could only give me the machine test at the hospital, and she proceeded to do so. I'm not entirely sure why she made the call she did next, but she advised (it turns out, in my case, incorrectly) that it would be better for me to have close up/reading glasses and separate distance glasses. I took her at her word. Thus armed with a prescription, and for the first time in my life with a fairly reasonable budget at my fingertips, I launched into an online try-on session of Marathon proportions. I finally found some frames that I really liked, for the distance set anyway.

     All of this did end up causing me considerable trouble. First of all, at that time I had believed that I would be going back to work, and spend most of my time in a small area. I had been told that my problems were burnout (true) and fibromyalgia (untrue: turned out to be a crushed cervical nerve, colitis-related fatigue, overwork-related joint and muscle problems and chronic damage, and arthritis in my back, neck, and hands).

a shame because they were the more attractive ones (see above). Oh well. Now, this was obviously not particularly good for my eyes, but it is what it is. I was just way too tired of switching them out all the time, and had even taken to wearing both pairs at once when doing photography in the field, but that was obviously also not a good solution. In the end, the distance ones sat at home a lot while I walked around looking over the top of the close ones and then down through them in my camera, rinse and repeat. All was in this way unwell until this past October, nearly a year ago.
     So what happened then? It was in the garden, during a wearing-both-pairs session. I, in my infinite wisdom, took off my close-up glasses to orient myself on a distant magpie and thought that the lawn was a good temporary repository, held up my camera preparing to move into position to put them back on and try to get a focus on the little guy, and promptly stomped my glasses to shit with my oversized, dilapidated gardening clogs. The lenses didn't shatter, nor even crack, amazingly, but they were scratched to oblivion and the hinges twisted (red pair below; the wadge of kleenex rests on my ear and raises that arm enough to line the glasses up relatively straight). 

     After that, in order to read or look at my camera or anything at all, I had to crane my head into insane positions which, since the crushed nerve in my neck hadn't yet been diagnosed and treated, made my entire right arm go numb and stop working or gave me extreme (and extremely temporary) spiking headaches. It was obviously unsustainable but we're poor, and additionally we were in the middle of not so much lockdown as that weird period of time during the first major lockdowns, when for some reason it was decided people should be able to wander freely in and out of shopping streets again, even as Covid cases were spiking. Observing the absolute lack of common sense in those around me (people refusing to wear masks, wearing masks incorrectly, taking masks off to cough, failing to understand the concept of social distancing, etc.) and given that there was as yet no vaccine available, there was no way in hell I was forcing my way down crowded shopping streets into an optician's to have someone lean into my face and touch me, are you kidding me? I soldiered on for a while, but it was obviously untenable. It turned out that the place I had ordered from before, in the United States, now had a six-month waiting list for European shipments, so I hit up a local parenting group with a lot of knowledge and asked where someone could use an existing prescription to order the cheapest possible pair of glasses online.

section of their varifocals was narrow, and for the first couple of weeks I had wild distortion at the sides of my vision at all times. The close-up section was so small that I had to tilt my head backwards and look down along my nose in order to read. The progression from close-up to far away was a bit jumpy so my pupils had to kind of do a jitterbug all day long. Anytime I was outside and the sun was shining, great blue streaks would appear across my field-of-view and dance at me merrily if I turned my head. They didn't fit very well, and would fall off sometimes if I looked straight down, so I was careful never to do that over water and tried to remember to wear a beaded chain. Being cheap plastic, I was unable to change their shape on my own (all my previous pairs, except the red indoor pair when I had two sets, were metal).

      And then it happened. Somehow, taking off my mask to put it in the washing machine, I managed to rip my glasses off my face. They fell barely a meter to bounce gently off a thick woven carpet. And they broke. They broke straight through one orbit, popping the right lens out, which, remarkably, didn't immediately throw itself against something scratchy. Now, I'm nothing if not handy, and I had a duct tape patch on that in no time but of course, every few days to couple of weeks, normal wear and tear, facial sweat, and that kind of thing would pop that puppy loose again and my lens started to fall out increasingly often.

     I had already had eyestrain for months, was finding it difficult to read at all, and all the other problems previously described were still extant. I bit the bullet and decided I had to get new glasses, real ones this time. And that's where we are now.
     This time, I wasn't going to fuck around. Opticians sensibly work appointment-only now, I am weeks past my second vaccination as are both other members of my household, and so on; time to do this right. Taking advantage of a "three"-for-one deal (actually a two-for-one deal, with a much lower-valued coupon as the third element, to be given to someone else — my husband does want new frames), I went in knowing exactly what I wanted. Whether or not I would find something attractive within those parameters was open to the winds; freakishly, I did.

     Those criteria were: as wide a field-of-view as possible, thus big glasses; all the coatings and treatments for lack of which I had been lamenting; and metal frames because I can form and repair those myself if necessary. As I said, I'm going to be paying these off for a very long time, eschewing thus new art supplies, occasional self-indulgences like a book every couple of months or so, a second pair of jeans, that kind of thing. But I can see! The difference is incredible. I've only been wearing these for two days but I'm already through the majority of the new adjustment eyestrain and loving every minute of this. Everything is sharp, looking from something close to something far is a smooth transition and not a series of jagged leaps, blazes and glares don't stab me unexpectedly in the brain, and I have peripheral vision again! It's glorious.
     I'm extremely glad I made this call, because there's a twist. It turns out I've been wearing the wrong prescription for a long time, too. Remember way back in this story when I went to the ophthalmologist at the hospital, who gave me the machine eye test? I've been wearing glasses based on that test for years and years. At the optician's, two weeks ago, their machine coughed up the same prescription – however, the in-depth examination with all the different which-side-is-clearer stuff and careful fine-tuning by the optometrist produced slightly and yet significantly different results. I am now wearing the right prescription for my eyes, with the different focal lengths spaced to my preferences.
     Here endeth, hopefully, this tale of vision sought and vision found. I intend to take great care of these and protect them and love them but if anything ever does happen to them, or several years from now wear and tear has taken its toll, I have an identical pair safe and sound, waiting for me.

     Here's looking at you!