The Girl With The Myodisc Eyes

by Specs4ever

I won’t, no I can’t, deny it. My attraction to, and my love of myopia have lead me to some strange circumstances. I have had people from all over the world write me, and compliment me on the stories I have written over the years. A film student even wrote me to ask me if he could make a movie of one of my stories, but I guess nothing ever happened, as I never heard anything more from him. Some of the people who have communicated with me have been out and out fakes, telling me a tall tale from their own imagination. But for the most part I have enjoyed every minute that this weird hobby has taken of my time.

A few years ago a young lady from London England wrote to me. She told me that she was about a –3.50D myope when she was 15 years old, and she wanted to increase her prescription substantially. So I spent some time writing her, and she did increase her prescription to around –14.00D by the time she was 20 years old. If she had taken my advice completely, I suspect that she would have been able to go even higher, but still, a –14.00D prescription is a pretty strong prescription.

Stephanie had a 14-year-old friend, who she helped with her schoolwork. Miranda was also a little shortsighted at the age of 14, around –2.50. Steff would dearly have loved to have Miranda become a lot more myopic, but she didn’t know how to go about it without Miranda catching on. I had suggested that she should buy Miranda a new pair of glasses, but in reality she would also purchase a second, identical pair, with a stronger prescription. Then she would have to find a way to switch the lenses on Miranda without Miranda suspecting anything. But Steff was a little afraid to do this.

In some of our discussions Steff had asked me a lot of questions about myodisc lenses, and what they were like to wear. I don’t know why I did it, but I had 2 pairs of myodisc glasses in my collection that I figured Steff could wear. One pair was a really gorgeous pair of black and red blended myodiscs that had a prescription of –22.50D in both eyes. The other pair was a pair of old fashioned plastic frames with blended myodisc lenses of –30D. I had figured Steff would require around +7D contact lenses to wear the –22.50D glasses, and about + 14D contacts to allow her to wear the –30D glasses. So, I ordered the plus contact lenses in her eye size and when they arrived I packaged everything up and sent them off to her.

My calculations were not quite good enough for Steff. I don’t know why, because with –14D of real myopia, and a +14D contact this should have added up to –28D. And since –16D of myopia requires a –14D lens, I figured that a +14D lens would work to create –16D of myopia. But Steff complained that things were too blurry through the –30D myodiscs. And, it was the same problem with the –22.50D glasses. –14D for her real myopia, added to +7, which is equal to about –8 should have added up to –22, and a young girl of Steff’s age should have been able to accommodate the extra –0.50D. But again she complained that the plus contacts were too strong. I sort of felt like suggesting that maybe she should either buy herself weaker plus contacts, or package everything up and send them back to me.

But, before I could do this, I got a note from Steff. In this note she told me how she had gotten Miranda to try the +14D contact lenses with the –22.50D glasses. Apparently Miranda could see perfectly through the glasses. This was wrong according to my calculations. –2.50D added to the –16D that the +14D contacts created should have given Miranda no more than – 18.50D. If Miranda could see as well as Steff claimed she could somehow Miranda was accommodating more than –4D extra. But, I couldn’t argue, because I had found years ago that GOC is a complete trial and error deal.

When an old geezer like myself goes into a mall wearing very strong and unusual looking glasses, nobody takes a second look at him. He is just an old guy with bad eyesight. But when a young girl of 14 goes walking about in public wearing a really sharp frame with myodisc lenses, a lot of people look. And some people stare, whereas others will actually ask the young lady about her strong looking lenses. Miranda was the only child of a single working mother, who had to work 2 jobs to try to make ends meet for the two of them. So Miranda received very little attention at home. And, as Steff and I concluded, the attention that the black and red myodiscs were bringing Miranda was attention that she was searching for. Steff told me that Miranda didn’t want to take out the plus contacts, and remove the glasses for any reason. She even timed everything at home so that she had not actually seen her mother for almost 2 weeks. For these 2 weeks Miranda had worn the myodisc glasses constantly. Steff told me that Miranda loved the glasses, both for the attention they brought her, and for the good vision they gave her.

Steff was with Miranda the day they met Miranda’s mother on the steps of the house Miranda lived in. Steff was totally amazed that Miranda’s mom looked directly at Miranda’s new glasses, and only commented that Miranda looked nice with her new glasses. I suggested that Miranda’s mom was likely so tired that she thought that she had forgotten that Miranda had gotten new glasses. From that day on Miranda wore the new glasses.

About 6 months went by, and Steff wrote me to tell me that Miranda now seemed to feel that she couldn’t see very well through the myodiscs anymore. I suggested that Steff have Miranda pull the glasses away from her nose, to see if things became clearer. Steff wrote back, and told me that things became more blurred when Miranda did this. So, I replied that Miranda had likely become more myopic naturally, and the only way she could keep wearing the glasses would be to get a lower powered pair of contact lenses. So, this time Steff spent the money to buy Miranda a pair of +12D contacts, and Miranda could see quite well again.

Another 6 months went by, and again Miranda was complaining about blurred vision through the myodiscs. So this time I sent Steff a pair of +10 D contact lenses. Miranda was happy again. And another weird thing was that now Steff could wear the –30D myodiscs when she wore the +12D contact lenses that Miranda had used for the past 6 months. I still couldn’t figure it out. For Steff to be able to wear –30D with +12 lenses, which were equal to about –14D, she was accommodating another –2D. And for Miranda, according to my calculations, with +10 D contact lenses, they were equal to no more than –12D of myopia. And if Miranda’s eyes had been –2.50D, this meant that in a year Miranda had increased her own myopia by –8D. I was a little worried about this, so I wrote Steff, and advised her about this.

Steff wrote back a few days later. She had taken a pair of her own old glasses that were –10.50D. With her contact lenses out, and the myodisc glasses off, Miranda had been able to see perfectly through Steff’s old –10.50D glasses. According to what Steff told me later, when she advised Miranda that Miranda’s eyes were deteriorating at a rapid rate because of her wearing the GOC, Miranda’s reaction was that it would be great if she didn’t have to wear contact lenses to wear the myodisc glasses. Steff asked me what she should do, and I advised her to do nothing. If Miranda wanted to go through life wearing myodiscs, then let her go for it.

After that discussion a few months went by, and I hadn’t been able to spend much time corresponding with Steff. I knew that Steff had ordered a new pair of rimless glasses for herself that were a little bit stronger than she really needed with a prescription of –15.50D, and that she had started wearing them as soon as she had gotten them. But until a note arrived about 8 months after I had sent Steff the +10D contact lenses for Miranda I hadn’t really discussed Miranda with Steff. In this note Steff told me that Miranda had recently found that the +10D contact lenses were now too strong for her to wear under the myodiscs, and that rather than buy a new pair of +8D contact lenses, Miranda had started to wear the +7D contacts that I had originally sent Steff in order for Steff to be able to wear the red and black myodisc glasses. And, what was even stranger was that Miranda was now able to see quite well wearing Steff’s old –14D glasses. I sure couldn’t get a handle on this GOC stuff at all, and I really wondered if anyone else could. It seemed that everyone’s eyes were able to tolerate different combinations, and there was really no one size fits all conversion.

I was amazed that Miranda was, after only a little more than 18 months, able to wear glasses that were –14.00D. She must have been more than –2.50D when we started. It is possible that she was more like a –4D. And since she was now just 16 years old, she had gained most of her myopia during her prime growth years. I suppose I could call this a form of induced myopia, although this was certainly a strange way to do induced myopia. But, this was interesting to me, as it proved that myopia could be developed this way. I didn’t even waste a minute thinking about it, I just went out and ordered a pair of +5D contact lenses for Miranda. I then wrote Steff, and told her that I was sending them to her in order for her to have them as soon as Miranda complained about not being able to see well enough with the GOC combination she was wearing.

It took a while before Steff wrote me telling me that Miranda was now wearing the +5D contact lenses. I think it was around 7 months, and this didn’t surprise me, because I expected that the lower prescriptions of plus contacts would take more time to get accustomed to. I asked Steff if Miranda was able to see properly when wearing her –15.50D glasses, and she reported that her glasses seemed just a little too weak for Miranda. As I thought about this, I realized that Miranda would now be getting closer to –17.50D, because a +5D contact lens would completely cancel out a –5D prescription. I wondered if I should suggest that the next time Miranda found that her + contact lenses were too strong that Miranda should then try to wear the glasses without any contacts. But I chickened out, and I ordered a pair of +3D contacts. After all, the way things were going, Miranda would be wearing the myodiscs without doing GOC soon enough. I told Steff that I had ordered the + 3D contacts, but for some perverse reason I didn’t send them to her.

Sure enough, by the time Miranda was a couple of months past her 17^th birthday, Steff wrote to tell me that Miranda had again found that the contact lenses were too strong. So I wrote back telling Steff that I had just mailed her the other +3D lenses. Steff wrote me and told me that this would likely be the last pair of contacts that Miranda would need, because she had tried the glasses without any plus contacts, and she could almost, but not quite, see well enough to wear them by themselves.

By the time Miranda was 18, she was wearing the myodisc glasses with no contacts underneath. I was a little worried about the glasses themselves. After all they were now 4 years old, and Steff wasn’t quite sure if Miranda could get another pair of exactly the same prescription. And, I actually wanted them back to return them to their place in my collection, but of course if they broke it wouldn’t be the end of the world for me. It would be a bit of a problem for Miranda though, because according to Steff, Miranda’s natural prescription was rapidly reaching the prescription of the glasses. Finally, after another 6 or 7 months had gone by Steff wrote me to tell me that Miranda had gone for an eye exam. It was amazing. Miranda’s natural prescription now exactly matched the prescription of the –22.50D myodiscs. In only 5 years Miranda had increased her myopia by somewhere around –20D.

Steff herself had gotten what she called her last pair of glasses. She sent me a picture of herself in her new –17D rimless glasses, and they looked fabulous on her. She told me that she had finished with inducing more myopia. Of course I wrote back and told her that she might want to stop, but nature would determine if she actually did stop. And, I also told her the same held true for Miranda. Steff told me that Miranda had gotten her first new pair of myodiscs, and that she had liked the black and red rectangular ones so much that she had chosen a fairly similar pair for her new ones. And, according to Steff, Miranda was extremely thrilled that she could now wear myodiscs in her true prescription. She was now truly the girl with the myodisc eyes.

Specs4ever July 2006 

Footnote: This story formed itself in my mind one day when I was listening to an oldies station, and I heard The Beatles and the song "Lucy In The Sky." As I listened to the words, in particular the line "The girl with the kaleidoscope eyes." the words became the girl with the myodisc eyes, and the idea for this tale slowly started to gel. My apologies to John Paul George and Ringo.