End Notes
Wearing Glasses
Specs reflect life's stages.
By Charles Meyer, M.D.
I opened my eyes and all was dark. Suddenly, the sickening-sweet smell of ether swept over me, and I began to vomit, my 3-year-old body trembling with each wave of nausea. An invisible hand thrust a pan under my mouth, and a voice said, “You have patches on your eyes so you won’t be able to see anything.” When the patches did come off after this first of two strabismus operations, I was fitted for glasses, and glasses have defined stages of my life ever since.
During my cowboy stage, I was a four-eyed gunslinger. Family photos show me with a tattered cowboy hat tipped jauntily to one side like Roy Rogers wore his, cowboy boots that seemed to occupy half my legs, a belt with two six-guns ready for drawing, and my clear plastic specs staring out from beneath the brim of the hat. An occasional incongruous addition to such pictures was my decaying stuffed doll, Big Baby, clutched in one hand. I looked like a bookish, nurturing Gene Autry, clearly not ready for many bad guys.
Later came my Buddy Holly stage. My high school senior picture shows me with what was then called an Ivy League haircut and wearing black-rimmed glasses similar to those in Holly’s press pictures. These interfered with high school pursuits such as football. Luckily my unaided distance vision was good enough to allow me to don a football helmet, take the field without spectacles, and occasionally catch a pass. Glasses also were increasingly not cool as more and more kids started getting contact lenses. As susceptible as any high schooler to “being cool,” I seriously considered wearing contacts. But after I saw friend after friend with red, teary eyes blinking to adjust their lenses or down on their knees trying to find a lens that had fallen out, I stuck with my Buddy Holly specs.
In medical school I started understanding my eyes and what had happened to them. Not only was I farsighted, but the imperfectly corrected muscle problem had left me with impaired depth perception. During one ophthalmology class, a resident showed us a depth perception test that used 3-dimensional pictures of flies with their wings seeming to stand up from the page. Each picture showed a different degree of lifting of the wings. As I struggled to detect even the most exaggerated wing separation, the resident said, “You might consider going into a nonsurgical specialty.” I accepted his recommendation and went into internal medicine, where my depth perception and hand-eye coordination are rarely tested. I have also invoked my disability as an excuse for my ineptitude at putting a basketball through a hoop.
My black rims eventually went in the dust bin with my Buddy Holly records, and I took on a bug-eyed look with big brown plastic glasses that gave me an expansive field of vision but looked too big for my head. Like so many styles seen years later, they now look silly. But when I watch movies with Robert Redford wearing similar goggles, I know that I was definitely hip.
When the morning paper began blurring, I entered the short-arms, split-level era of glasses, embarking on a brief, somewhat scary encounter with lineless bifocals. Every day for a week, I labored to find the right place on the lens to focus my eyes but found only a smeary, vertiginous whirl that made me feel like I had just emerged from the house of mirrors at a carnival. I switched to lined bifocals, which announce that you’ve reached a certain age and that hearing aids are not far behind. Free of vertigo, I mastered the obligatory head bobbing and peering over the line when walking down stairs. Since then, every few years when the newspaper again starts to blur or I begin to miss the sharps and flats on my band music, I trek back to my ophthalmologist for new glasses and maybe the start of another stage of life.
Both Robert Redford and I have abandoned the bug-eyed look. I now have smaller frames that, as I study my childhood photos, look a lot like my first pair of glasses. Maybe it’s time for a new pair of cowboy boots. MM
Charles Meyer practices internal medicine in Edina and is editor in chief of Minnesota Medicine.