Corrective Lenses

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I was in class, fairly early on, in somewhere around the fourth grade when the teacher whom I don’t remember noticed I was squinting to see the blackboard. (I remember living with a headache as though it were normal) I was sent to the nurse for an initial eye test and shortly after that I must have been to see the optometrist who would have prescribed for me my first pair of glasses.
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Another pre-glasses memory I have is lying at the base of a Christmas tree and looking up at the blinking lights which were bright, fractured, fuzzy and soft.
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I tried contacts lenses in high school and I liked them when I wasn’t suffering from viral conjunctivitis. It was brought on by me failing to clean them properly and it was really painful.
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My work as a carpenter has kept me from trying them again. The glasses help keep the stuff out of my eyes. I wear them from the moment I get out of bed until the moment I crawl back in.
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I am reluctant to get my eyes operated on to correct them as I really like being able to take a visual time out by removing my glasses.
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My camera, quite by chance, created an admirable approximation of how the same scene would look to me with and without corrective lenses.
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With

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Without

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