I cannot remember a time when I didn’t wear glasses. I got my first pair in Grade 1 when I had trouble seeing the handwriting on the blackboard unless I sat at the front of the room. I’ve had frames in almost every style since then. Big. Small. Winged. Square. Oval. Round. Plastic. Metallic. Even no frames at all. I imagine the biggest problems for my parents were keeping my glasses clean and in one piece! Plastic came in during the 1980s – when I’d become more cautious with their care and well beyond the childhood mishaps that broke them. Today’s options are even greater with frames that twist and bend without harm and lenses for any situation.

I got progressive lenses at age 40 – knowing something was amiss while struggling to thread a needle even while held close to my eyes (most people complain of the same with small print). Progressives move smoothly from “distance” at the top to “reading” at the bottom, avoiding the traditional bifocal lens with its obvious square-blob reading area in the lower lens.

Recently I saw a teenager with cat eyes – pretty cool looking but definitely weird. Contact lenses became mainstream in the 70s with the move from hard to soft but now the possibilities seem endless, with looks that include those cat eyes or any number of others including disguising your eye colour. They can be tinted, disposable, or even have distance and reading in the same lens… but they’re still influenced by advances in laser eye surgery that free you from eye wear completely.

I, however, am stuck with glasses, for no other reason than I don’t like anyone fiddling with my eyes. In fact I despise fiddling with anyone else’s eyes, even if asked to look for an eyelash or a piece of debris. I can’t imagine sticking a contact on my eyeball and then pulling it off! During my senior surgical rotation in nursing school I feared I might perish when I discovered I’d got placed in the Eye Operating Suite, and I had to meet with my instructor to sadly say that if I could not be moved then I would have to quit. I got moved. Even then the worry remained that I’d get a patient with a glass eye that I might have to clean. Phew – it never happened.

I was reminded recently, while reading a book about Marie Antoinette, of how far we’ve come. It commented on how Louix XVI had tremendous difficulty following the affairs of state because of his shortsightedness – he simply could not read the documents. Today we wear glasses or contacts or have surgical correction. We cure cataracts with lens implants and blindness with corneal transplants, sometimes giving sight to those who never had any! I grump about misplacing mine or having to fetch them from rooms that I’ve left, but I never, ever, question how fortunate I am to have them.