
Ask HN: When did you realize you needed glasses? - gerbilly
I&#x27;m pretty nearsighted, but a first I didn&#x27;t realize it.<p>The day I realized I needed glasses, it was the last day of sixth grade.<p>Most of the kids had left the classroom and I was alone with the teacher and a girl named Francine.<p>The teacher was asking us how we found the class, and I said: &quot;It was great, but I found it hard to read the board from the back row,&quot; and Francine says, &quot;What do you mean, I can read the board fine from here. You need glasses!&quot;<p>Stupidly I hadn&#x27;t considered that they wouldn&#x27;t put pupils that far from the blackboard if it were impossible for them to read from that distance.<p>I just figured they put the smart kids in the back rows because they could get by without reading the board and I spent the whole year transcribing as the teacher spoke, and passed my sixth grade without ever being able to read the blackboard.
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andr
I had occasional lazy eye and went to an eye exam as a kid, which didn't give
me any useful info. In my 20s a friend performed an eye exam on me and
diagnosed me with astigmatism in my left eye. Since my right eye was seeing
much better than the left, my brain would essentially not take care of the
left one as much and not move it in sync. Glasses fixed it.

As a side effect of the astigmatism, I did not have stereoscopic vision for
most of my life, and thus terrible depth perception. A few days after getting
glasses, my brain adapted, and I saw the world in 3D for the first time. It
was like getting an going from an old school TV to 4K - there was so much
detail in the world that I could not see until now.

I still don't see 3D movies in 3D, but that's not something I miss.

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lathiat
I was about 27 years old, it was a combination of very bright LED signs on the
freeway being unreadable, and not being able to read the aisle signs at
Bunnings (a home improvement store, like Lowes).

I definitely had perfect vision somewhere earlier in my 20s, so it seemingly
deteriorated rapidly relatively to my -1 on both eyes that I am now.. but slow
enough that I didn't notice for quite a while. I had basically decided things
just get blurry further away and not really noticed.

Probably does not help that I am in front of a screen 12 hours a day like most
:)

~~~
acranox
That’s pretty similar to me. I don’t hear that version too often.

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lobe
Funny timing, I just picked up my first pair today. 24 years old.

Last 2.5 years I'd been sick, and one of the medications I had to take on and
off was prednisone, an anti-inflammatory steroid. Although it was a temporary
miracle for my problem, the long list of side effects are less "these things
might happen" and more "pray that not all of these things happen". Amongst
others, 2 side effects were general brain fog / headaches and poor vision.

I got my eyes tested 2 years ago when I was first on it and the prescription
needed was so slight I was told not to bother and live with it. This time
around I had the headaches again, and attributed it to the drug. After
realising they weren't going away as much as I would expect whilst tapering
off the drug, I got my eyes checked again and this time my eyesight was
significantly worse than before. I should also mention that I was having a
hard time reading anything illuminated at night, so I just assumed that was
something that glasses wouldn't solve.

I picked up my glasses 2 hours ago, and whilst I have a bit of a headache
adjusting to it, I can't believe how clear everything is. Feels like I have
superpowered vision. I took a walk to the park and looked across the bay to a
mass of houses and apartment buildings. Just looking at it gave me a headache
because there was so much detail at such a far distance it felt like my brain
was struggling to process it all at once.

Best of all, I can now use my computer again without headaches. I'd been
putting off going to work until the headaches resolved, but was surprised that
my distance glasses made everything on my computer perfectly sharp, despite
only sitting ~1m away from a 34" monitor.

Interesting thing is that I am told that I may not need glasses once I am off
prednisone, however I suspect I will as I can't recall seeing this clearly in
years. Probably will just have to get the prescription changed in a few
months.

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taeric
I was mid 30s before I realized for sure I needed glasses. Billboards were
difficult for me to read. Eventually, I had to acknowledge that road signs
were getting slower for me to read, period.

When I got my first glasses in, I was shocked to see that trees across the
street were much more detailed than I realized. :)

~~~
RickS
> When I got my first glasses in, I was shocked to see that trees across the
> street were much more detailed than I realized. :)

This was one of the most illuminating bits to come from getting glasses,
because it pointed out a serious bias: we project our sensory abilities onto
the people we interact with.

In other words, I assumed everyone else could see about as well as I could
see, so if I couldn't make out some gesture from X distance, i felt safe
assuming for example that I could do that gesture at X+1 distance and not be
seen.

The idea that other people could perceive my actions with more clarity than I
could perceive theirs was a real shake-up. It invalidated all kinds of
assumptions I had made over the years. Every time you think you're being
slick, or don't recognize a friend at a distance -- that could be one sided.
It made a lasting change on how I think about the world.

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lr4444lr
Spent 30 minutes chasing down a bug that was a mistyping of "m" instead of "n"
in a variable name. Yep, that convinced me it was time. I only use them for
work, though, or other long periods reading in front of a screen.

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mattbgates
I think I was in 4th grade.. nearsighted with a stigmatism. I had fibbed at
first, thinking glasses were cool, getting letters wrong purposely, and later
wanted to not have glasses, but both my mom and the doctor said you can't
really fake the test when there is machines that measure the dimensions of
your eyes and determine if you need glasses or not.

I wore them from 4th grade until my third year of college.. when I went to a
LASIK center for a free consultation. She was very eager to sign me up. I
said, "Well can i go home and think about it first?" She said, "We get busy so
I'm just making you an appointment. If you have any doubts before the
appointment, just call and cancel. Otherwise, see you then!"

I've not worn glasses since 2009... I love it. I still wear gamma ray glasses
because I stare at computer screens all day. While the eye doctor has said my
eyes have gotten a bit weaker, and says I may need glasses in another decade,
he said that my eyes are still in good shape from the LASIK.

------
idonotknowwhy
Second year of university. I always thought the university was cheap, buying
poor quality projectors. After I got glasses, my grades suddenly shot up to HD
average (but didn't help the first 1.5 years of poorer grades)

After that I loved walking around and just looking at things. I could read
street names on signs, read billboards 100+ meters away, see individual power
lines, etc.

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numbsafari
It was in 8th grade. I took a routine eye examine and they said I needed
glasses. It wasn't until I was in my mid-20s that I started wearing them full-
time though. I held out as long as I could because I couldn't really afford
nice ones and I hated wearing them. Because I basically had the opposite
prescription in my eyes, it was like I had built in bifocals and could just
shift between them depending on what I was looking at (near vs. far).

But, driving at night and in the rain got to be a real challenge and I
realized I was going to hurt someone else if I didn't do the right thing.

Unfortunately, I don't qualify for LASIK or some of the alternatives due to
the nature and the causes of my vision impairment. Fortunately, I don't need
to wear coke bottles and stylish glasses have become more affordable.

------
oeuviz
It started out pretty slowly by the end of third grade when I sometimes could
not read from the overhead projector if words were written in red. I realised
I could read it if I got closer and as from one semester to another you could
choose a different place to sit I chose one that is closer to the projection.

However, it turned out that my eyesight got worse and I increasingly failed to
read other colors as well. That was when I told my parents. Around 18 months
had passed from the first moment of realizing until I took any action to
actually correct my eyes instead of just sitting closer.

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bookofjoe
When I was around 40. I noticed that the slides in our Medical Grand Rounds
were always out of focus and wondered how come nobody said anything. One day
it dawned on me that they were out of focus only for me. Doh!

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daw___
At 12 years I was studying piano and accidentally realized that the scores on
the pentagram would blur out if I leaned backward.

Oh, as I write this comment I realize that the piano event occurred around the
same time I started losing interest in school. Given that the distance between
a piano player and the score is significantly less than the one between a
student and the blackboard, I might have started being affected by myopia
months before discovering it; maybe I started losing interest in school
because I could not focus the board?

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thisisit
My story is kind of similar to yours. I was one of the tallest guys in the
class. So, I was put in the back rows and one day I realised I couldn't read
the blackboard.

But I stammered too and hence very shy to share this "deficit" with anyone. It
continued for a long time before things got worse and couldn't transcribe
anything from the blackboard. I started crying so, they called my dad. He took
me to a doctor and I got glasses.

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tenken
Since age 3, I wore eye goggles. I have Retinopathy of prematurity.

I dislike the current eyewear trend of large frames and lenses. I've worn
double digits prescription all my life and try buying frames and expensive
lens to avoid "big" glasses to no avail; and current trends are to wear large
fashion statement eyewear with a 0.15 prescription lens. Meh. Get off my lawn
:P

And screw IOLs or sharp things carving up my eyes. No thank you :D

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dcherman
Hah, was just talking about this a few days ago. I was at work, maybe around
24-25 years old, and couldn't figure out why all of the supposedly high def
screens in our conference rooms were so bad, but I could still read them
without a ton of difficulty. Was driving home and realized I could no longer
comfortably read the license plate of the car in front of me, then it dawned
on me what was going on.

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md81544
I was about 45... I was soldering some electronics and realised I couldn't see
what I was doing. Presbyopia seemed to happen overnight :)

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airbreather
I sometimes work in electrical panels and they have markers with numbers on
for terminals, wires etc.

One day I was head in a panel trying to work out a problem and realised it had
got to the point where I could not get my head far away enough from the wire
markers to read them.

Got a set of clear bifocal safety glasses for about $14, made life heaps
easier.

Apparently you can get stick on bifocals that you can apply to any glasses as
well.

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Adamantcheese
2nd grade, couldn't see the whiteboard from the last row of class. Teacher
noticed and tried sitting me in the first row, which helped. Parents informed,
had glasses the next week. Vision continuously got worse for 13 or so years,
stabilized now. Thank goodness for polycarbonate lenses, the glass ones I had
before I was 18 were immense.

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AnimalMuppet
Somewhere around first or second grade. So I got glasses (progressively
stronger), then contacts.

Then I went in for an updated prescription, and the optometrist said, "The
good news is that we can skip the rest of the exam. The bad news..."

I had cataracts.

After surgery, I no longer wear contacts. But I need glasses to read for very
long, or to work on a computer all day.

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csa
When I went from being an all-star clean up batter one season in little league
baseball to barely being able to make contact the next season. I was 10 or 11
years old.

The glasses I got during the season got me mostly back to my previous form,
but by that point I had decided that I actually liked soccer more. That was my
last season of baseball.

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passionforcode
I think I was realising that I need glasses, sinds I started work. I need just
a small correction, but without the glasses I had all day headache. Since I
use my glasses it disappear.

Since one year I started use lenses in the night. Just before sleep I put them
in and go sleep. In the morning I remove them and can see like normal.

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bcook
I was in my early twenties and my friend's mother commented about my squinting
while playing video games. The optometrist said I had 20/50 nearsightedness.

I still rarely use my contacts because it's somewhat overstimulating to see so
well; it feels unnatural, though contacts and/or glasses are an obvious
inevitability I need to accept.

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joshvm
University, first week. Tried a friend's glasses during a lecture and learned
that projectors aren't normally blurry and that it's possible to read the fire
escape signs from the back of the theatre. My initial prescription was around
-0.25, slight enough that far away stuff being a bit blurred seemed feasible.

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agitator
Hah! I was the same way. Some kid in 7th grade got glasses, and everyone at
the table was trying them on. I put them on and realized "Holy shit! I can see
whats on the board!" I used to squint or just write what I was hearing, or
walk up to the board at the end of class and quickly write things down.

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akmarinov
At around 10th grade. Joked around with a classmate's glasses, put them on,
looked at the blackboard and was like "Woah, it looks so much different".

Luckily he was at about my prescription.

Then got glasses.

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drakonka
I knew I had pretty bad vision for a while, but really started thinking about
it when I almost failed my driver's license eye check. I got LASIK to solve
the problem.

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thaumasiotes
When I noticed that I could read the board from the floor in front of the
desks, but not from the desks behind the floor sitting area.

It hadn't always been that way, either. :/

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is_true
When I had to increase the brightness in my screen after beign for to long in
fron of it. Went to have my eyes checked and I had astigmatism.

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punchclockhero
Third grade at the pediatrician, jokingly looked at the vision chart, noted
that I can't see much and the rest is history.

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herbst
I was 22 or so and realized everyone else is seeing things I don't so I get
myself checked and got glasses.

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trumbitta2
Actually, the same as you. Just for me it happened on the first day of high
school.

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orastor
When I started driving, I realized I couldn't focus well, especially at night.

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dragon1st
When I saw McDonald sign, instead of 2 humps, I saw 3

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FreekNortier
5th grade

