I was at a Mets game with my brother (I was about 35) and he mentioned something about a player, identifying him by number. I told him I could not read the numbers, so he let me try his glasses. Everything cleared up! To this day his prescription and mine are nearly identical.
I always had good vision as a kid/teenager, and I figured that if I didn’t need glasses by the time I was 18 then I’d probably be fine until at least my 40s (when most people need reading glasses).
In university I had lots of large classes in big lecture theatres in first and second year, then in third year all my classes were in small classrooms. I could always seen the chalkboard/whiteboard/projector screen just fine. Then in fourth year I had some classes in a large lecture hall that I also had classes in two years before - but this time I couldn’t read the screen. I figured out pretty quick that I must need glasses.
For many years, every once in a while I would get up (having been sitting down for a while) and suddenly have very staticky vision – everything was there, but most of it was obscured by black and white specks, much like you would see on a TV with bad reception; because of this, I had a great deal of trouble keeping my balance until my vision cleared. These incidents would usually be separated by three to seven weeks – until the summer between junior and senior year of high school, when it happened to me at least once a day.
My current glasses are .4/.4, though I suspect they need to be a bit stronger, because my eyes are getting tired more easily than they used to.
I was 12, in sixth grade, and having trouble reading the chalkboard or making things out at a distance–I also played softball and I was having trouble making out people’s faces. So I had an appointment with the optometrist, and I’ve been wearing glasses ever since.
My experience was about the same as the OP–late 30s, starting to find that documents are blurry when I read them, and so on. I tried a pair of the drugstore glasses, but while they were OK, they weren’t great. There was still a problem.
So I went to the eye doctor for an exam. It was typical onset-at-age-40 presbyopia, but as things turned out my eyes had different degrees of presbyopia. I needed reading glasses, yes; but unlike the ones available off the rack at a drugstore, each lens had to be different. And what a difference they made! I could read comfortably without any strain, and without holding the document at arms’ length.
SomeUserName, your experience sounds a lot like mine. Save yourself the hassle and the headaches I had–go to the doctor and find out if there is a problem, and if so, just what it is. Who knows, the prescription just might fit a pair of drugstore specs; or it might be like mine, where the lenses need to be different. But either way, you’ll know for sure.
When I started turning my head sideways to watch TV as a wee lizardling. My houseparents (I was living in the dorms at school) noticed and got worried, and then they had my eyes tested. My right eye was degenerating rather fast, and my left was slipping too. Next time I went home, I got glasses. Complete with a silly pink string to hold them on.
These days, I have coke bottom glasses. Or I would if I hadn’t sent away to some German company to have high index (is that the right term for it?) plastics made. I probably qualify as legally blind without them.
When I was driving at night and crossed the double yellow because I was trying to read a street sign on the left! I can totally get by during the day with no correction, but from dusk on, or if I’m in a movie theater, or if I’m driving somewhere unfamiliar, I really notice that my vision’s not so hot.
I have needed them for as long as I have lived. Of course, having nothing to compare it to, I had no idea. But once they fitted me for them I was so thrilled to be able to see that my folks had no trouble getting me to wear them.
Last year, just before I turned 24, when I went to renew my driver’s license. I belly-flopped the vision test. The lady at the DMV had me look into the little device they use, and I quickly rattled off the three lines that I saw. And waited, and waited for her to tell me I was done. Finally she said, “Good, now how about the fourth line?” There was no fourth line (as far as I could tell anyway). She was really nice about it - got a different device, in case the one I had used at first was broken, had me move my head around to all different angles - none of which helped. She finally had to fail me, and off I went to the optometrist.
When I got there, the eye doctor was really surprised that I hadn’t noticed any problems with my vision before. “Well,” I said after thinking about it for a minute, “I watch a lot of foreign films and I noticed that I have a really hard time reading the subtitles in the dark.” As geeky as that admission was, I did manage to refrain from telling him that I’d noticed the same problem playing KOTOR a year ago.
I’m still not quite used to wearing glasses, and I take them off when I’m nervous, which is (as I learned earlier this week) not a great thing to do if you’re giving an hour-long in-class presentation where you have to read a whole bunch of crap off a powerpoint with really tiny type. One day I’ll learn…
In my early 40s I began having trouble reading the big green and white signs on the interstate at night. Now at fifty, I wouldn’t dream of driving at night without my glasses, but could manage in a pinch during the day.
Six years old, first grade. The usual story. Could not see the board very well.
My eyesight is extremely poor to say the least. I cannot imagine what it must be like to need glasses only some of the time and not all of the time. That’s a completely alien concept to me.
I needed them in my first semester of college, mostly for reading.
I have a problem when it is dark too. Last month there was a day I had to go in to work early and it was still dark out. As soon as I got on the highway I was scared shitless. It was so hard to see more than what seemed like a foot in front of my car.
I drive this same road every day, five days a week and I felt like I was on a strange road, which also scares the crap out of me.
There were other cars on the road so I used their tail lights to guide me, not the most ideal thing for sure. At least it was not a long drive. By the time I got off the freeway five miles later I was almost in a panic.
Now if I go in early I take the long way around. It takes longer but the average speed is 35mph. There are more lights than on the freeway but there are parts were it is dark and if no other cars are around I can use my high beams which helps a great deal.
Same here, only 5th grade. I got headaches, and had to keep asking the teacher to let me move my desk closer to the board.
(then they told me I’d probably only need to wear them til I was 14. I’m 39 now and still wearing them)