I highly recommend this surgery

I was about eight; it was the late 1980s. About the stove in the kitchen of our apartment in Moscow was a digital clock. The kitchen table where I had my meals was just a couple of meters away. I had developed a habit of looking at the clock often. I had noticed that if squinted, it was easier to see the time of the clock. But then, with every passing month, the figures became blurrier. Even squinting didn’t help. I thought then about how I’d struggled to see the board in my class from any row other than the first. The connection was clear — I had trouble seeing things in the distance.

I shared the problem with my parents. I was calm at first but then broke down in tears.

Soon I started wearing glasses; in no time they became inseparable from my face.

Over the years my eyesight had gotten so bad that I couldn’t part with my glasses for a second. Truly, they were part of my body. I guess it was genetic. My mom is extremely short-sighted. She wears glasses with super thick lenses. By my early teens, my myopia reached the indicator of minus six. My mom was around minus nine.

In my teen years, for some silly reason, I wore the type that turned dark brown in light. Because there is always some light, I was left with constantly tinted glasses. These chameleon lenses must have been expensive and even trendy when my parents bought them in Russia. They probably thought they were doing me a favor. Mom wore the same type. The glasses were not trendy. They were ugly.