As a child, Agnes was teased for having a bad vision and even beaten up by bullies. Her parents tried everything to make her see well, but nothing worked until the day they discovered the eyeglasses prescription that would change their lives.
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Initially, her eyesight wasn't bad; in fact, it was perfect at distances greater than twenty feet or so, where Agnes could see perfectly well. But close up...that's another story. The world looked distorted when she wore her glasses as if seen through water.
"I'm not going blind!" she told Dr. Vantana.
"There must be something else we can do."
"If there is," he replied, his brows knitted together, "we haven't found it yet." He paused, considering the situation, then continued, "The good news is you're young, and you'll have time to figure this out. You've been wearing your glasses since childhood, which means your visual cortex is accustomed to processing images without distortion. I think we just need to retrain your brain."
Vantana was talking about optometry. It was the technology used by Eye doctors to help people who couldn't focus properly due to astigmatism, presbyopia, or other vision conditions. They created an artificial image called a monovision lens that allowed them to focus on one distance while ignoring the others. The result: no double vision and perfect depth perception at whatever range you wanted.
But for Agnes, the new lenses were worse than the old ones. Now her brain saw everything from two hundred yards away as though it were from five. That meant things looked small and distant; everything was blurred. She didn't know how much more blurry things could get before her eyes went blind, but she suspected it was only a matter of time.
She had gone to Vantana's office after seeing him in person, wanting answers and desperate for help. After hearing her description of what she'd witnessed, he immediately sent word to Doctor Sterling, his partner.
Together, they examined her and made a diagnosis. Agnes now needed a pair of binocular lenses or bifocals, as they were sometimes known. But the only options available were the original bifocal lenses.
These lenses provided separate viewing zones at both near and far distances.
Dr. Vantana shook his head sadly.
"You should try these monofocals," he suggested.
He reached into his bag and pulled out a pair of sunglasses with clear plastic frames that housed the monofocals inside the arms. They looked like normal glasses, but upon closer inspection, they revealed the glass to be a thin layer between each arm and the frame itself.
As Agnes put them on, she instantly realized how wrong she'd been. There was indeed a single line dividing the viewfinder area into left and right halves. When worn, the glasses were almost entirely black except for the white dot at the center of the top half of the lens. On either side of the center dot were small red dots to indicate where the lines divided. In theory, she could switch back and forth to whichever zone she desired.
It felt odd having different views of the world at once, but the experience was also surprisingly pleasant.
After testing the device and determining that Agnes had adapted well to it, the doctor offered some final advice:
"Keep using them. We may find a solution soon. And if you ever run across any other person with similar issues, bring them here. We might have an answer."
And with that, Agnes returned home and got to work training her brain to see again. Over the next few weeks, her monofocals gave way to bifocals, then trifocals, and other versions that she quickly lost track of.
The problem remained the same, however: everything seemed fuzzy when she looked closely at anything, and the effect was most pronounced when she stared at objects for too long. This caused many days of boredom as she spent hours looking at the sky or staring at trees.
Eventually, she came to accept the fact that the world was blurry to her and learned to live with it. The only thing that mattered to her now was getting rid of the monofocals, which meant finding a way to fix her eyes. As the days passed, Agnes grew impatient.
One morning she awoke and noticed a change. Her pupils were larger, as though they'd grown wider overnight. It was subtle enough that it took several minutes for her to realize what had happened. A smile crossed her face.
She was becoming accustomed to her monofocals and wasn't noticing their absence too. She was seeing better than she had since her childhood!
The feeling was exhilarating, even liberating. It reminded her of being young again, and she couldn't wait to share the news with her family.
