I was the first kid in my class to get glasses. This was at the end of 2nd grade. No one teased me. In fact, I was admired for it, don’t ask me why. Torture didn’t begin for me with the other kids until puberty, thank goodness.
Wow, different diagnosis, but similar story to mine in some ways. What a relief to find your son didn’t get the gene! My first major condition, keratoconus (Corneal becomes football-shaped instead of baseball-shaped.) is one my sister has and none of our relatives or ancestors did. Docs can tell at age 15 if a kid has it (though the small-town Montana docs missed it on me until I was in my 30s.). What a huge relief to know your kids didn’t inherit your eye hell, eh?
13 eye surgeries later, here I am. Vision can’t be corrected with lenses BUT I’m doing so much better than before first surgery. L. eye vision was 20.2200 uncorrected; right eye was 20/2900. I have other issues, like glaucoma and optic nerve damage, but those are under control. Sooo lucky.
How in the world do you have the condition AND the gene that protects against the condition??? Yikes.
Sorry for the hijack, folks.
Wow, that sounds awful. Fingers crossed that everything stays “under control.”
Were the surgeries under general anesthesia or local? I salute your fortitude either way. (I’ve had both, but while I didn’t count the number of procedures, I’m certain the total is well under 13. YIKES.)
I had a foreign body removed from my cornea under a local; my eyeball, and everything around my eye was numbed, so that they could use something that looked like a ungodly cross between a speculum and a an eyelash curler to keep my eye opened. My head was in a sort of vise so I wouldn’t move it, and my hands were restrained so I wouldn’t reflexively touch my face. Then they used some kind of needle or probe to push to push the metal splinter up, and tweezers to pull it out all the way.
I had to watch the whole thing from the inside. Since I couldn’t feel it, and I’d been given a muscle relaxant as well as a benzo (probably Xanax) they could do a lot to me, and I didn’t care.
Damn, I’d have loved that, and restraints on my hands would have been nice too. Instead, no sedation, just a local anesthetic in the eyeball, and grips to hold on to. Plus constant reminders, “Don’t blink! Hold your head still!”
I think my doctor trusted me far too much.
{{ runs away screaming }}
I was still a teenager. I was 16 or 17, so not really a child, almost an adult, but young enough that they probably first of all, had more leeway in deciding to restrain me, and second, more worry about being sued if something did happen to me, and they’d put “too much” responsibility on me.
Slight hijack. I had a close friend who was very nearsighted, but his parents ridiculed him and would not permit him to get glasses. Once he was creating a pinhole lens between his two thumbs and two forefingers (try it; it works by narrowing the aperture) to see something at a distance and his father got very angry convinced he was faking it. He had to join the Air Force to get glasses. Fortunately, he could read perfectly well.
I got glasses in third grade. They were never very strong. I got ribbed as fatty (which I was), but that’s the only thing I remember.
I was in fifth grade when a public health nurse came to the school and gave everyone in my year eye examinations. I remember reacting so badly when she told me that I was myopic and would need glasses that the school had to call home to get my mother to come talk sense into me. I don’t remember getting teased much, but I was a kid who almost never started fights, but never backed down if challenged. Until I was old enough to buy my own glasses, they all looked pretty much like the ones @What_Exit showed above.
I used to hope that, being myopic, as time went one I might eventually stop requiring glasses since the trend is to become far-sighted with age. Unfortunately, while this is slowly happening, my depth-of-field is still only about a meter and is now centered about 1.5 meters away from my face.
My family has a form (mother’s side) of post-pubescent onset myopia. As a child, my vision was better than 20/20. There was no number for it-- it was just called “superior to testing parameters,” or something like that.
But I needed glasses at age 19. I couldn’t see the board in my college lecture halls. Now, I need them to watch the big screen TV when it’s more than 20 feet away. Must have them for driving in order to be able to read street signs. Went to bifocals about 10 years ago, and trifocals 18 months ago, as the myopia prescription has gotten stronger and stronger.
There are seven of us on my mother’s side. Me, my brother, and five cousins. All but one of us got glasses for myopia between ages 16 and 23. My mother never needed them, but her sibs did, both around age 20.
My mother always claimed it was because they were TV addicts, and she wasn’t; the family got a TV very early on, in something like 1947, because my grandmother won second place in a raffle, and the prize was a TV. My grandmother was a lottery/raffle/etc. addict. This one was a fundraiser for her kids’ school, and they were all selling tickets at a dime apiece. My grandmother bought ten from each of them, which was a pretty significant sum of money then-- but she got a TV that cost about $200 in 1947. That’d be nearly $2,000 now.
My mother made my brother and me sit at least 6 feet from the TV (there was tape on the rug), while her sibs were live-and-let-live. She was always predicting that her nieces and nephews eyes would be ruined.
As the oldest, I was the first one to get glasses. And it was one of my 15-inches-from-the-screen cousins who still doesn’t need them.
This clip from the morning news on the local ABC affiliate is simply delightful:
https://old.reddit.com/r/chicago/comments/kdr4xu/tanja_babich_is_a_tv_anchor_in_chicago_lady_week/
Summary: News anchor wore glasses all week in support of her daughter who was concerned of what others would think of her own.
I recall doing that in high school when we were watching captioned videos in Spanish class. I have no idea how I figured it out but, you’re right, it does work. I didn’t get glasses until a year or two later when I started to drive.
In my school district, glasses-wearers were seated at the front of the row. It was apparently a requirement, as every teacher from first grade thru high school put me (and the other wearers) there. I’m surprised that no one else mentioned this in the thread. Maybe it was unique to my district.
There’s an exception to every rule. FWIW, I’m surprised you didn’t get picked on for not picking on anyone.
Being a victim never stopped anyone from making someone else a victim. When I was in grade school, there was one kid who was palsied and used crutches to get around. I have no doubt he got picked on a fair bit for it (not by me), but whenever he thought he could get away with it, he would smack me with his crutches, absolutely unprovoked.
I don’t remember seeing kids picked on for wearing glasses unless they were already getting picked on.
That’s very true. When I was in later elementary school (public school), and intermediate school, there was a girl who was really overweight-- if a child can be morbidly obese, she probably was. She was popular, though, and never got teased or bullied for her weight.
There was another girl who was the target of a lot of bullying, for various things, and one of them was for being “fat.” She was slightly chubby. No way was she in the same class as the popular girl who was seriously overweight, but the slightly chubby girl got teased for being fat, because she was already unpopular.
In fact, while my memory isn’t very clear, I don’t think that, before puberty, she was even chubby at all-- like back in the 3rd or 4th grade-- but she was already being teased for one thing or another.
I don’t remember well what she looked like then, but I remember feeling sorry for her. I was the new kid in third grade, though, had a lot of my own problems (pretty bad ones, really), and I didn’t stick up for her. I still regret that.
OK, it is confession time.
I wore glasses, and was teased a bit, but since I was otherwise physically a bit ahead of my classmates it didn’t go very far.
I also developed a thing for girls with glasses. They were approachable and often were pretty bright, which was and is a major attraction factor for me. Grrrr…girls with glasses!
Where the hell did you kids grow up?