I knew this day would come sometime. After wearing my contacts for 18+ hours a day, everyday, my eyes have finally rebelled and decided not to cooperate any more.

Bright light had been causing me pain and I finally went to the eye doctor yesterday. My eyes have been injured a bit a nd need time to heal. What that means is no contacts for a week or until everything is healed up.

Due to my condition, keratoconus, this is a big deal. The condition does more than just make me nearsighted, it creates a smearing of what I see. Kinda like permanent double vision.

Special contacts basically give me 20/20 vision by correcting for the myopia and the optical bending that causes the smears. Most people wouldn't know that I'm legally blind without my contacts. Without my contacts, I need to hold things about six inches from my face to have any chance to read it. Even then, I need to squint to see anything. I do have glasses, but they can't correct for the smearing or fully for the near-sightedness. As a result, the glasses extend my reading range out another foot or so.

To write this on the computer, I need to lean far forward and increase the font size on the computer pretty high. Spending more than 45 minutes or so trying to read or use the computer guarantees a headache and sore eyes from squinting.

While this sucks and all, I have it good compared to some people and their eye problems. There are many people that never get a chance to see well at all. In that respect, I feel very lucky that I get to see normally most of the time. Of all the maladies that people suffer, I got off easy compared to many.

So what does it mean? It means I can't drive or really work. Work involves a lot of reading and computer work. I can't watch TV, it's all a blur, even with my glasses on. So while my eyes heal, I basically need to walk around with my glasses off and do nothing.

Too top it all off, the dog chewed off the end of my glasses where they rest on your eyes, so I need to go out and get new frames for the lenses.

So I will see you all in a bit. Until then, do good work.

Posted by michael at June 22, 2006 09:16 AM