Survivalists who need glasses

You may have noticed that all three of our major contributers wear specs. Because of this I was filled with an almost unholy glee when our stats showed us that someone had found our blog using that search term on google (although I was mildly confused at the fact that 39 people found us through searching for ‘Tia Dalma’). But then my apocalypse-obsessed brain got to working on this concept. After all, what does a survivalist who needs glasses do?

I am quite short-sighted. Not so much so that I can’t see without my glasses, but enough to increase my vulnerability. At a certain distance people become blurry blobs of colour and shade, and in the dark my night vision doesn’t make up for it. I can go about life without my specs, but everything becomes more confusing and difficult- and I live in one of the richest countries in the world, pretty much protected from the harsh realities of survival.

I know that people with eye problems in poverty-stricken third world countries really struggle, so much so that charities exist to send optometrists out there to prescribe and give out glasses. And while games like Fallout imply that we’ll just be able to loot specs from peoples corpses, anyone who actually wears glasses knows that prescriptions areĀ  complex and personal things. Even wearing a pair with a similar but not-quite-right prescription can be a confusing and surreal experience. And without optometrists, once my glasses are broken- that’s it. I’ve got nothing.

So, what to do? Well, buying as many pairs of ‘spare’ glasses as you can afford and keeping them in your go-bag is one (expensive) proposition. But your eyes often change over time. Raiding an opticians lab sounds like a good option until you realise the lenses up there are all just huge discs, not yet ground down and place into frames.

Well, This is one of those situations in which there is no ‘ideal’. You’re simply going to have to take as many pairs with you as you can, and raid opticians on the hope of complete glasses in your prescription. Our descendents will have more of a problem, but hopefully they’ll adjust and find options. After all, before the invention of glasses, our ancestors had to cope. Not very well, in some cases, but they had to cope all the same.

And that’s the truth of post-apoclayptic survival all over, after all. Things will be far from ideal. They’ll be difficult, and we’ll want to give up. But we’ll just have to cope.

 

5 thoughts on “Survivalists who need glasses

  1. I have read that having a sturdy metal frame makes repairs possible. Whereas plastic frames will crap out beyond fixing pretty easily. Especially if the break is at that damn joint with the tiny screws…

    1. This is true.

      I used to work in an opticians and the plastic frames are almost impossible to repair unless it’s just that a screw fell out. We tended to do minimal repairs on metal ones too, but they are theoretically more easy to repair. There are more glues that will work on them, and if necessary you can solder the damn things.

  2. I first got glasses when I was in 3rd grade. I was very rough on them and went through five or six pairs before my parents finally invested in a pair of Flexon frames. Those lasted me from middle school through my sophomore year of college before they finally broke (the bridge). I soldered them back together and that held until I could afford another Flexon pair. Those finally broke after about seven years, also failing in the bridge when a box hit me in the face.

    I’d highly recommend Flexon frames or one of the knock offs now that they’ve lost their patents. They’re very durable and if they break, you can solder them back together until a replacement can be found.

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