I am grateful to live in modern times when bad vision can be corrected, and I can read books and see to drive a car with vision correction. My contact lens prescription is -10 in both eyes though I'm now corrected to -10 in my dominant eye (the eye I'd use to look through a hole in a wooden fence, for example) and -8.5 in my other eye. I was having trouble reading fine print and for a crazy reason, this method of eye correction with normal contact lenses works though it causes a bit of depth perception problems, especially with night driving, but I don't do that often anyway.

Bad eyesight runs on my father's side of the family. He said he had a grandfather who always told the optician to make his glasses as thick as possible. It went on to my paternal aunt, one of my sisters, and me. My sister & I were discussing it, and we wondered what our relatives did before modern times.(At least for now, our vision is correctable with contact lenses or glasses). Our past relatives must have been treated nearly like blind people. They couldn't cook because of the danger of fire & burning themselves, couldn't plow the fields or feed most animals, couldn't even see well enough to watch any child beyond a baby would couldn't crawl. I guess they had the women doing things like snapping beans and peeling peas. God knows what they did with the men. We're curious how they managed to survive with such horrid eyesight but surmised they must have been extremely intelligent. Both sides of my father's family were known be very smart; otherwise we don't know how they kept the line alive because they would have been more of a burden than help on a farm.