I am SICK AND TIRED of not being able to see and moreover I am sick of having to explain to people why I can't see even though I am wearing glasses. I have keratoconus, a condition that in its advanced stage renders my vision uncorrectable via glasses or regular soft contact lenses. I had been wearing rigid gas permeable lenses for it but they were never comfortable and I had to get the prescription changed at least twice a year, and each change required a lot of fine tuning where I had to visit the optometrist once a week to see if the latest ones fit. Well, my most recent left contact fell right out of my eye when I was playing hockey and my optometrist couldn't fit me with a new one, so he referred me to an ophthalmologist who in turn referred me to a corneal specialist. This process has taken
four effing months during which the entire world has basically been a haze and my depth perception is complete crap.
I subconsciously squint all day long to have any hope of reading anything, get awful headaches, have a ton of tension in my shoulders and still just plain can't read some things because the text is too small. I can't set up PCR anymore because the wells in the 96 well plates are too small and the pipetting is too precise for me to be able to do quickly enough that the Taq doesn't warm up so I can't finish my own lab work and have to make undergrads do it. I have been playing hockey with one RGP lens in and my catching passes, picking up pucks and shooting accuracy have gone to hell which is super frustrating for a competitive person like me.
At my appointment with the corneal specialist last week I was told that there was a 50% chance that one of the doctors at the practice would be able to fit me with a hybrid contact lens (soft around the outside and rigid in the center) in my left eye. If I can't get fitted with one, the only real option left for restoring anything resembling decent vision in my left eye is a corneal transplant of some type. You know what group has the highest risk of rejection for this? Oh yeah, young females!
Recovery time is highly variable and sometimes very long for a corneal transplant and rejecting the graft could pretty much occur at any time even years after the surgery.
There, how's that for a rant? I really do feel like the worst part of all of it is that nobody can "see" how awful my vision is (my left eye is worse than 20/150 "corrected") so I have to explain why I look stressed or why I'm squinting or why I didn't recognize you from down the hall no I wasn't ignoring you I promise......
I'm just hoping that the hybrid lens thing works out. My appointment is next week.
