Glasses for My Kid

    It was early in our child's life when my husband related to me that when he was around seven years old, his eyesight suddenly degraded from totally normal vision to needing thick glasses. I had assumed he'd always had bad vision and I was slightly horrified for what that might mean for our offspring, but I came to grips with the fact that my child would probably eventually need glasses. 

     That was fine. I wear glasses all the time. I prefer them. When I got glasses at the age of 15, it was only then that I noticed that other people could read the brightly lit store signs that I had only thought of as electrified smudges. While I couldn't see the board in class, I wrote down what the teachers were saying as they were saying it, so I never had any academic issues. I was firmly under the assumption that all of the other children in orchestra class just memorized the music better than I had, when really they could read the music from their seats and I could not.

      To my delight, my child is going to a school that has regular eye checks where an optometrist from the area checks through the student body's eyesight and alerts us to any difficulties. Thanks to these checkups we've noticed her eyesight gradually degrading and got her in for an ophthalmology appointment regarding that. She came back with a prescription for glasses that we then took to an eyeglass shop and let her choose from the frames available.

     There are several differences with eyeglass shopping in Japan from an American standpoint, including the fact that the 20/20 vision scale doesn't exist here at all and many things are not covered by insurance in the slightest. That said, in general these days you can get an affordable pair of eyeglasses if you look in the right places. 

     We got her a great pair of glasses that she was very excited to wear...for about a week. If her eyesight were as bad as her father's is, and everyone in the family assumed that it was, then her glasses would need to be used constantly.

     And then bought her swimming goggles.

     My husband, who had looked over the prescription form, ordered negative 7 level prescription goggle lenses. When they came, both my daughter and I had a hard time looking through them without feeling slightly nauseous.

     My husband had no problem with them, of course. Finally we looked at her perscription form again, and it turns out that my kid does not have a negative seven level prescription. She has a negative 0.7 level prescription. So while her timing for ocular deficiency matches up with her father, her level of ocular deficiency is more in line with mine.

     For all I know my eyes were similarly bad at that age. They just got a bit worse before anyone noticed that anything was wrong. 

     I feel very, very lucky that we are in a place where my daughter got the check up she needed when she needed it, got to choose glasses that she wanted, and gets to see when she needs to see. I'm also relieved that her eyesight is not as bad as her father's is...yet.