by Tom the Hungarian
1. A New Life
Jenny was a quite short, skinny girl with glasses, quite interesting to look at, with her minus 5 or so glasses twinkling up at me, that's why I married her. Alas after a couple of years it became clear that she was not going to have any children. We searched around for an alternative, and the best one was adopting a child from Eastern Europe. We got in touch with an agency specializing in such things, got ourselves signed up, and within a few short months we got our baby delivered. She was called Maya, a little scrap of life only a few weeks old from Romania, dark haired, and with lovely dark blue eyes and pale skin.
A few weeks after that Jenny had to go to a conference associated with her job. She never returned. A few hours later than the time she should have been home by brought a knock at the door and the worst possible news, that she'd died in a car crash miles away. A few days later there was the funeral, and then it was just me, trying to look after Maya and rebuild my life.
After a few months Maya was able to sit up and play, and that was really fun, but as time went by I became sure of something that I'd been half-aware of for some time past: that Maya didn't seem to be responding to visual stimuli in quite the way I thought she should, nor did her response agree with the books and information on childcare I had. Waving something like a soft toy with no bells or squeaks inside it confirmed it: beyond a short distance, something like 3-4 feet, she didn't seem to be aware of it. This was most disturbing to me. I took Maya to a local eye clinic to get her checked out, and they confirmed my thoughts. Using equipment rather more exact than a stuffed rabbit, they were able to ascertain that she had minus 12 of myopia in her left eye and minus 10 in her right eye.
The obvious next step was to correct the myopia using the simplest and easiest method possible. That meant glasses. A couple of weeks later I took my little bundle of fun - Maya - back to the clinic and got her fitted with her first pair of glasses, first of many pairs, I was told, and I wasn't surprised to hear that. They were thick, as you might imagine, and small, to fit her little pretty face, and when she got them on, she smiled and giggled, and started learning to use them almost immediately. The doctor told me
'She'll need a month or two to get used to them, bring her back in say, eight weeks?'
Maya soon adapted to seeing the world through her thick little lenses. She could now see the rabbit way over the other side of the room, and more besides. The world was quite a different place to the way she'd seen it before, which was to her just some strange blurry place. She always laughed and smiled whenever I put her little specs on in the morning, and often cried when they got took off for bath time or bed. She was starting to connect what she saw with the glasses, obviously. The times I had to wipe the goo from her lenses, where she'd put her fingers in her mouth and then over one or both lenses. It seemed so funny to me.
Maya was just over one year old when I took her back to the clinic. I was just thinking that maybe her visual troubles might be at least under control, when it appeared that Maya was on the way to a bad case of amblyopia:
Her left eye seemed to be giving up and letting her right eye take over, and that had to be stopped. The solution was patching. A short while later Maya had her glasses taken from her, and a little patch stuck on the front of her right eye. She liked having her glasses taken not at all, and as a further insult, they were given back, but she could not see out of her right eye. She was not pleased, and bawled her eyes out. Being a one year old child she could hardly argue with it, though.
Over the next few weeks I did my best to stimulate her vision in her left eye, and she gradually settled into seeing with just her left eye without any tantrums, which was good news. The next visit to the clinic came around and her vision had worsened by a dioptre in each eye. Her new glasses, now recognizable as normal ones with metal frames and thick, tough polycarbonate lenses, seemed to help her see clearly, but the doctor said to me
'I don't think we can get her vision to 20/20. We might get it to 20/40 or 20/30 if we are lucky, in the space of a few months. We'll know more when she starts reading. Her acuity is now 20/80 in her left eye, somewhat better in her right eye.'
Unfortunately her new right lens had to be immediately patched, leaving her with just her other eye.
This sort of game went on for the predicted six months. These days Maya was starting to read and talk, growing and walking just like a young child should. At last a visit to the eye clinic brought good news. Her vision in her left eye was as good as 20/40, and deemed as good as it was going to get for the moment. I naively thought that was the end of the patching, but no. The patch merely got swapped over, so that the same didn't happen to her right eye. Within a few weeks her right eye had "woken up" again, and when she was nearly two, she had her patch removed.
That was good news, but by now she could undergo something like a normal eye exam and produce an exact result. Her vision was stable in terms of amblyopia, but certainly not so in terms of myopia. Her left eye had minus 14 and her right minus 12.5. The doctor was able to say, barring a miracle, that her myopia would simply progress to the point where her glasses would not allow her to drive, perhaps she would be partially blind by the time she grew up.
2. Growing up
A couple of years later Maya started school. She was a tall, slim young girl, elegant in her movements and quite kindly and charming, but her thick little glasses with their shiny plano fronted lenses certainly made her less attractive, detracting from her pretty face. And plonking her at the front of the class was the best that could be done to help her see the blackboard. A couple of rows back was no good. She didn't have the visual acuity to read it from there: something like 20/50.
At first it was all fun and childish innocence, but then it seemed like every morning was a battle to get her go, and every evening a tearfilled journey home. She was getting teased badly, about her thick glasses and inability to see clearly. I took her from that school and moved her to another. Maya seemed happier, to the point of not fighting with me in the mornings and not appearing with a pretty, tear-streaked face in the afternoons, but she had no friends as far as I could tell.
A couple of years whizzed by, and this tall, slender girl got on well at school academically, but that served only to worsen her vision, her head stuck into reading books close enough to read them. Her glasses were now minus sixteen left eye, minus fifteen right, and her best corrected visual acuity 20/60. It was going to be a fight to keep her out of the ranks of the partially blind, and I was prepared to give it a go. I looked for ways to prevent her looking at things too closely. There was a sort of article on the net about some doctor, a Dr Hoffmann by name, who was trying to develop a sort of helmet-type device that prevented myopic children getting their noses stuck too far into books - literally speaking! It was made of light but tough plastic, and consisted of lot of stiff spiky bits. He concluded that his first efforts were not very safe!
I got in touch with this doctor through the internet and asked if I could try his ideas on my daughter, Maya. Dr Hoffmann agreed, and even agreed to come and visit me: it was quite a buzz getting involved in something like this. He was a short, chubby man, pleasant and good with children, including my pretty Maya. He showed her the experimental helmet, but she was far from impressed. She said
'Daddy, please don't make me wear that. I will look like a hedgehog!'
We chatted for a while about putting some sort of plates at the end of the spikes, to serve two purposes: to make it safer to be around other children, and to make it more effective. The children he'd tried his first helmet on were pushing the books between the spikes, so that they could read the print more easily!
I was watching TV one day, a documentary about the space race when I saw the space helmets, large bubble-like things, and had a brainwave. Why not make the helmet like this, a sort of bubble? My mind raced around for the next few days, refining the idea to a small bubble rather more like a diver's goggles, to make it lighter and a bit more practical. To make sure the child looked through the furthest part of the bubble from their eyes, I thought that the closer sections could be frosted. Only the front part, a sort of adjustable bit that could slide back and forth to accommodate various vision and print size combinations. I emailed Dr Hoffmann, and he was very interested and impressed with my thinking. He said he would get a trial model made to fit Maya, if I wished. Most certainly I wished, for while she looked lovely in her glasses, I really did not want to see her groping around blindly with really high myopia.
A couple of weeks later Dr Hoffmann brought his prototype. I showed it to Maya. She wasn't anywhere as against wearing it as the "hedgehog", but was far from enthusiastic. Once on, she brought a book up to her face - as usual - and found that she couldn't bring it near enough to her face to read it easily. She moaned
'Daddy, I can't read it. Not into the corners.'
I persuaded her to persevere with it, but after a couple of pages she became tearful and I had to let her take it off.
It wasn't so much what it looked or felt like, it was more because it did not allow her to see the words clearly.
I tried a few more attempts with the "space helmet", but each time Maya started crying and I had to let her take it off. One day I went to find it, and found it smashed. I was angry for a moment, but I realised that perhaps this wasn't the right way, not for Maya anyway. My experiments came to an end there, and my contact with Dr Hoffmann too. It was impossible to see any change for good or bad thanks to the helmet.
I took Maya to the optician a few months later, now seven years old. Her myopia had increased to minus 18 left eye, minus 17 right. Her lenses were small, thanks to her being a child, but at 15mm thick were quite a pair of chunks. The optician suggested that she be given bifocals to try to slow down her myopic progression. I didn't mention my little experiments: the evidence was that bifocals helped in a lot of cases. Despite the extra correction, she now had only 20/70 of visual acuity. I remember coming out of the optician, and asking Maya
'Can you read that street name? On that sign?'
Maya dimly said
'What sign?'
and I had to walk her over to it. She realised there was a sign there quite soon enough, but we were within 10 yards of it before she could read it - albeit with some determined squinting. She was often surprised to find that I could see further than her, and this time she said
'Daddy, what's it like to see clearly?'
I did my best to explain. It was much more than simply comparing my 20/20 to her 20/70.
Another three years passed by like lightning. Maya was by now eleven years old, with the first whispers of womanhood coming to her tall, slender frame. Again I took her to the optician, something of a yearly pilgrimage for us: this tall, willowy girl was now growing fast and so was her myopia. She'd just got her first pair of myodisk lenses in her glasses, round metal framed ones. Alas they didn't seem to let her see much better. Her myopia was now minus 25 each eye, with visual acuity down to 20/90.
A few months later, during the summer, she pestered me to come and watch her play tennis. I'd know she was into it, but had never seen her play. Her friend Sharon was similarly partially blind but had a considerably smaller prescription to achieve this. They played with a ball with a little bell inside, to help them find and follow it. It was a game of little science and much laughter, but I didn't mind because my daughter looked like she was enjoying herself.
3. Searching
I told Maya about that time that she wasn't my child. She was an intelligent kid, and had wondered why she wore fantastically thick glasses and had lousy vision, whereas I had neither of these problems. She wasn't upset, she still loved me, and showed no inclination to find her real parents. Possibly Romania was too far away for her.
Maya got stuck into school and her books in a big way. It was too late to worry about helmets and eyesight and all of that. By the time she was thirteen her vision was down to 20/100, and when she was sixteen, 20/140 with 18mm thick lenses in her glasses, needed to try to correct her minus 36 worth of myopia in each eye. Her lenses had been monovisioned for about three years, allowing her to see into the distance, albeit fuzzily, with her right eye and close up with her left eye.
Suddenly Maya came to me one Saturday, her dark blue eyes lost somewhere behind those impenetrably thick lenses, and she announced
'Dad, I have found my sister on the internet.'
I was intrigued, so I went upstairs to her room, where her computer sat, showing an email from a girl called Cristina Jonescu. Apparently Maya's enterprise had got her to this stage, though a sort of penpals site, almost by accident. She had been emailing her for a few weeks before announcing her discovery. She let me read a few of the emails, and I soon had a mental picture of Cristina's family. She had a sister called Helena and a mother, and her father had died a few years ago. And then Cristina had sent a photo of herself. She was a lovely, slim, tall, young woman of about 19 or 20. And she wore glasses too! Her dark eyes peeked out from behind two thick myodisked lenses: it was strangely like seeing something like a grown-up version of Maya. And she said in another email that Maya let me see
'I'm partially blind. All my family wear glasses, too.'
Maya squinted and pointed to that, saying
'She's just like me.'
Maya worked on getting a visit arranged. She pestered me, but soon found I was quite happy to help, and was so pleased when I said I'd take her to Romania myself. She didn't really relish going around trying to puzzle her way around a place she could see so poorly.
A few weeks later we landed in Bucharest, and got on train to the town we were told to head for. After a bit we got off and I guided Maya along the platform. She said to me
'Can you see them? Can you?'
After a couple of odd moments I saw a tall, young woman just like the one in the photo I'd seen on Maya's computer. It was Cristina. Her glasses were, if anything, thicker than Maya's. With her was a young man, possibly some relative, or maybe Cristina's boyfriend. It was impossible to tell. But there was no-one else waiting around, certainly no-one with thick glasses, so I walked over and introduced myself.
Cristina was so like Maya. Twins they could have been, separated by three years and thousands of miles, but so similar were they.... They smiled and chatted, I chatted, I smiled, as the young man took us to the car. He didn't seem to have any visual problems: that's why he was driving. A few minutes later we arrived at Cristina's house.
And there I had a sight that I shall long remember. Everything around the place was arranged to help people who couldn't see clearly. Furniture looked like it had been in the same place forever. Things written down were in a large hand. By the phone there was a small selection of magnifying glasses in a penpot. Over on wall was a bookshelf, and the books had titles written in oversized letters. On another wall were family photos. All of them showed the girls as children, always in glasses, and their mother, again always in glasses. And in most of them was a tall handsome man who unlike the rest of the family did not appear to wear glasses. I took him to be the father of all these girls.
There in the front room was Cristina's older sister, Helena. She, like Maya and Cristina, was in thick myodisk glasses, the flat fronts shimmering in the bright afternoon light streaming in through the windows. She squinted at me, and smiled, and said hello. And then in came their mother. She was in her late thirties, but it did not really show: in some ways time had been particularly kind to this widow: she had always been tall, slim and elegant, particularly in the dress she was wearing. But her eyes... they were all but invisible behind her immensely strong and thick lenses, myodisked as in the case of her daughters. Despite all the tricks her optician could muster, they were so near an inch thick as to make no difference. Her fingers rested on one piece of furniture after another as she came closer, squinting her finest squint, looking at me as if she had been looking for me for a long time, then her two daughters, then Maya. As she turned her head, a band round the back of her head revealed itself to me, there to help hold her thick, heavy glasses in place, squashing down her long dark hair. She hugged Maya, looking at her, talking at her in Romanian. Of course, I knew not a word of it.
It was left to Cristina to introduce her mother to me. Her name was Eva Jonescu, and she had been myopic all her life. Her two elder daughters had inherited the trait, but she did not know about Maya when she as a baby. When it came to the adoption, she went to the agency without glasses, guided by her husband, saying that she had been blinded in an accident. The deception had worked, and the family had got money to survive with. Cristina left us alone for a while, I don't know what was on her mind, but it seemed obvious once I thought about it years later. Eva's english wasn't so hot, really, but we got by, soon starting to feel like we had been through very similar experiences, with our partially blind daughters and the loss of a spouse. Except that Eva had two such daughters and was registered blind herself. She didn't tell me, but I found out later her RX at this time was minus 45 each eye, hence the very thick lenses!
4. All together now
I don't know quite what happened, or why, but I felt a strange attraction to this lovely Romanian woman, she seemed so intelligent and lively, and loved to hear what my country and my house was like. For some reason she said she wished to go out and would like me to guide her. She got her coat on, and picked up her white stick: there were two, one for Eva and one I assumed for Helena. I should have realised that was coming. She then stood and waited for me to take her hand.
The walk was just a visit to the local shop, there she peered closely at some stuff on one of the aisles, asked me to read it, and then realised I didn't read Romanian at all. She laughed at the irony of her helping me to read something!
On the way home she took me a different way, judging her way by landmarks rather than by streetnames. I mused that here was someone else with Maya's problem with streetsigns and the like, only more so. She then asked me
'Is there a sign over there, please? Read it to me.'
Again it was in Romanian, of no particular meaning to me. We went up to it, and with her help and translation, it transpired that we were at the entrance to a park.
'I was just checking that it was open today.'
Was her explanation.
For a while we walked around the park, Eva getting me to describe things to her. It was so like being with Maya, except the descriptions had to be for bigger and closer things. Eventually she pulled to a stop near the river, and came close to me, pulling gently at my arm. Her eyes squinted softly, and her fingers felt my cheek. She planted a kiss there. I guessed that some of the emails Maya did not show me involved getting Eva and me together, something I was not adverse to at all.
From then on I was in heaven. Eva would do anything for me at home, and if she couldn't, she got her daughters to help her. It was real shame when the visit was over and we had to leave ten days later. But really, it was just the beginning. Maya, Cristina and Helena exchanged emails regularly, and so did Eva and I. She started calling on the phone too, referring to me as her darling... we were in love... and we had to be together.
Some months later we got the Visas sorted out for everyone. Eva wanted to come to live with me, with her two daughters. The immigration officers were very good and allowed them all in together. And few months after that was our wedding day. The best bit - apart from me marrying Eva, was that her daughters made such lovely bridesmaids, all in thick glasses and all so beautiful. So I settled down to my new life, with the four most myopic and beautiful women I know.