Ask HN: When did you realize you needed glasses?

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.

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. :/

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.

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. :)

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

5th grade

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.

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

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.

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.